auto-reload-brunch

Adds automatic browser reloading support to brunch when using the brunch watch command.

The plugin uses WebSocket technology to pass compile events to browser.

Installation

Install the plugin via npm with npm install --save auto-reload-brunch.

Or, do manual install:

• Add "auto-reload-brunch": "x.y.z" to package.json of your brunch app. Pick a plugin version that corresponds to your minor (y) brunch version.
• If you want to use git version of plugin, add "auto-reload-brunch": "git+ssh://[email protected]:brunch/auto-reload-brunch.git".

Usage

In most cases, auto-reload-brunch works out of the box without any further configuration. Stylesheet changes will be applied seamlessly, and any other changes will trigger a page refresh. To prevent a stylesheet from being reloaded automatically, set the data-autoreload="false" attribute on the stylesheet's link tag.

Brunch plugin settings

If customization is needed or desired, settings can be modified in your brunch config file (such as brunch-config.coffee):

• enabled: (Boolean or Object) Defaults to true
  • As a boolean, turn on Auto-Reloading for any change in your project, or off entirely.
  • As an object, enable Auto-Reloading for specific types of changes. Keys are the file extensions of compiled files (js or css) or assets to cover any other watched files that do not get compiled. When an object is used, only the types explicitly set to true will trigger an Auto-Reload.
• port: (Integer or Array of Integers) Defaults to [9485..9495]
  • The port to run the WebSocket server on. It will be applied automatically on the server and the client.
  • If an array, it will use the first value, but automatically fail over to the next value in the array if the attempted port is already in use on the system. This allows multiple instances to run without conflict.
• delay: (Integer, in milliseconds) Optional, no default
  • If your system is having race-condition type problems when the browser tries to reload immediately after a compile, use this to set a delay before the reload signal is sent.
• host: (Default: '0.0.0.0') Server's host address.
• forceRepaint: (Default: false) forcefully repaint the page after stylesheets refresh. Enabled in Chrome by default to mitigate the issue when it doesn't always update styles.
• keyPath: Optional, no default.
  • Path to private key used for SSL.
• certPath: Optional, no default.
  • Path to public x509 certificate.
• liveJs: An experimental option to live-reload JS. See the section below on more details.

Example:

exports.config =
  ...
  # Every setting is optional.
  plugins:
    autoReload:
      enabled:
        css: on
        js: on
        assets: off
      port: [1234, 2345, 3456]
      delay: 200 if require('os').platform() is 'win32'
      keyPath: 'path/to/ssl.key'
      certPath: 'path/to/ssl.crt'

Client-side settings

If your brunch watch is running on a different machine than your preview screen, you can set server config variable to connect to a brunch/websocket server running at another ip address.

<script>
  window.brunch = window.brunch || {};
  window.brunch.server = '192.168.1.2';
</script>

You can also set the port (single integer only) and/or disable auto-reload via client-side scripting, although generally it's a better idea to use brunch config for this:

window.brunch['auto-reload'].port = 1234
window.brunch['auto-reload'].disabled = true;

Live JS reload

Starting <unreleased>, auto-reload-brunch can try to reload JS without reloading the page. For that to work, you need to be using CommonJS modules with Brunch <unreleased>, or if you don't use modules, with any Brunch 2 version.

To enable it, set plugins.autoReload.liveJs to true in your config:

module.exports = {
  ...
  plugins: {
    autoReload: {
      liveJs: true
    }
  }
};

It works by loading your updated scripts. Without proper handling this can break your app due to state stored in your modules.

Until Hot Module Replacement is implemented by Brunch (and it is a complex API, but a discussion is open), that means using a global to store the state that needs to be transferred to the updated module, however "bad practice" that might seem. For example, if you are using React with Redux, you'll probably want to save your store globally, and upon module update, replace the reducers with the newer ones:

if (!window.store) {
  window.store = createStore(counterApp, 0);
} else {
  window.store.replaceReducer(counterApp);
}

(https://github.com/goshakkk/brunch-livejs-reload-stage1)

Custom file extensions

Starting <unreleased>, you can configure what extensions count as stylesheet and javascript reloads. By default, any compile file with an extension other than .css or .js will do a full page reload. The match option allows you to issue efficient stylesheet-only reloads for other file extensions as well.

The value of match.css and match.js is an anymatch set, and so can be a wildcard, regexp, function, or an array thereof.

module.exports = {
  ...
  plugins: {
    autoReload: {
      match: {
        css: ['*.css', '*.jpg', '*.png']
        js: ['*.js']
      }
    }
  }
};

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Paul Miller (http://paulmillr.com)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.