CODEWITHSUNDEEP
reactjsservice-workerprogressive-web-apps
joedotnot
joedotnot

Reputation: 5153

React PWA without https - what are the limitations?

Service workers require HTTPS ... If your production web server does not support HTTPS, then the service worker registration will fail, but the rest of your web app will remain functional.

quoted from the docs at https://create-react-app.dev/docs/making-a-progressive-web-app.

What does it mean the rest of your web app will remain functional, but service worker registration will fail? In other words, if my app remains functional, do I really care if service worker has failed? (what are the limitations?)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 763

Answers (1)

Nitsew
Nitsew

Reputation: 3662

So your app would still work, but you would lose all of the functionality provided with the service worker. At the bottom of the "Why Opt-in?" section of the Making a Progressive Web App it states:

The workbox-webpack-plugin is integrated into production configuration, and it will take care of generating a service worker file that will automatically precache all of your local assets and keep them up to date as you deploy updates. The service worker will use a cache-first strategy for handling all requests for local assets, including navigation requests for your HTML, ensuring that your web app is consistently fast, even on a slow or unreliable network.

So you could use it as normal but you would lose:

  1. Offline support,
  2. Precaching of your local assets,
  3. Cache-first approach for your local assets and navigation requests,
  4. Performance improvements of your application in slow or unreliable network conditions.

Whether or not you care if it fails is directly related to if you value these features in your application. If they are critical to your application, you probably care a lot. If it doesn't matter to you either way or affect your end-user, it's probably not a big deal.

You can find out more about Service Workers and why they only work using HTTPS in the Service Workers API documentation

Upvotes: 1

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