Here’s What You Should Know About React Developer Tools

This Could Be Useful for Production Builds

Evgeny Kirichuk
2 min readAug 26, 2022

When developing applications, I frequently use React developer tools. It’s a handy extension, but it occasionally causes problems for developers.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

What the react-devtools_backend is

When optimizing an application, developers frequently divide it into chunks.

The developer navigates to the Network tab to see how application resources are loaded. And here he might find an extra.js file.

react_devtools_backend.js file

Many developers have been curious about this file and how to disable it.

It is simply a file that the React Developer Tools browser extension loads. However, due to the non-obvious file name, you may not immediately recognize the connection.

This means that there is nothing wrong with your application. The extension simply loads the code required after your application has loaded.

However, some developers are looking for a way to prevent this extension from working with their applications. Why?

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Evgeny Kirichuk

Coder, writer, husband, cat’s father. Share valuable ideas, modern technologies, and productive workflows. Technology | Programming | Productivity.