Support express 5 with webpack-dev-server

[RobinBorresen]

Feature Proposal

Im having problems with upgrading express to v5 combined with webpack and webpack-dev-server.

The issue seems to come from the breaking change in configuration for http-proxy-middleware which now is a peer dependancy that I have to install manually, and webpack-dev-server uses v2.0.7 which has a breaking change in the configuration compared to version 3.

Webpack-dev-server@5.2.0 also uses express@4.21.2 which creates dependancy conflicts when upgrading.

Feature Use Case

I wish the following dependancies to be compatible

"@types/express": "^5.0.0",
"express": "^5.0.1",
"http-proxy-middleware": "^3.0.3",
"webpack-dev-server": "^5.2.0",

Please paste the results of npx webpack-cli info here, and mention other relevant information

  System:
    OS: Linux 6.8 Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS 22.04.5 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)
    CPU: (20) x64 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900H
    Memory: 47.91 GB / 62.41 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 20.9.0 - /usr/local/bin/node
    npm: 10.1.0 - /usr/local/bin/npm
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 131.0.6778.85
  Packages:
    css-loader: ^7.1.2 => 7.1.2 
    less-loader: ^12.2.0 => 12.2.0 
    style-loader: ^4.0.0 => 4.0.0 
    ts-loader: ^9.5.1 => 9.5.1 
    url-loader: ^4.1.1 => 4.1.1 

[alexander-akait]

@RobinGulbrandsen We don't use it in peer dependancy, it means some package use this, not webpack, can you provide a full error message?

[RobinBorresen]

I apologize, turns out our code is depending on a lib that uses it transitively which is the root cause for my errors. Created a small sandbox project to verify that the errors was on our side.