Disable webpack's file watching for vim swp files

I know nothing about "webpack", but you can tell Vim to store swap files in a single directory instead of the current directory with the 'dir' setting. I use this in my vimrc:

set dir=$HOME/.vim/tmp/swap
if !isdirectory(&dir) | call mkdir(&dir, 'p', 0700) | endif

This will also fix issues with other tools, as well as "dangling swap files", swap files in VCS systems, etc.

If you want to ignore Vim swap files in tools (such as webpack) then remember that just ignoring .swp is not enough; Vim may also create swap files with extensions such as .swo, .swn, etc.

You can exclude files based on a pattern:

module: {
  loaders: [
    {
      // existing loader config
      exclude: /\.swp$/,
    },
  ]
}

You shouldn't be bundling everything by default, though; use a loader test to only bundle .js files (or whatever you explicitly needs; .jsx, .css, etc.). Something like this, for example:

module: {
  loaders: [
    {
      test: /.jsx?$/,
      loader: 'babel-loader',
      exclude: [/node_modules/, 'test/', /\.swp$/],
      query: {
        presets: ['es2015', 'react']
      }
    },
    {
      test: /\.css$/,
      loader: "style-loader!css-loader"
    },
  ]
}

The answer for me was the following change in the webpack configuration

<webpackConfObject>.devServer.watchOptions = {
  ignored: /\.sw.$/
};

The exclude attribute of modules does not apply to the file watcher that triggers an event to reload the page on the webpack dev server, but you can ignore files that match a pattern.