Davit

"A small crane on board a ship, especially one of a pair for suspending or lowering a lifeboat."

This project is extremely work in progress.

Davit is a live-reload, development server made because the tool I used previously, Browser-Sync, doesn't seem to be maintained much and also does a lot more than I need. I also wasn't able to find anything else that also supported cleanly running some code before reloading the page.

Davit aims to as lightweight as possible. There's only two dependencies, ws, which might be replaced with my own code as it's also doing way more than I need it for, and mime, just used as a prepackaged way to determine mime-types.

Basic Usage

The following code will start a davit server that watches for changes to the style sheet.

const { Davit } = require('davit');

const dv = new Davit({
	root: 'src'
});

dv.watch('media/style.css');

dv.start();

CLI Usage

To run Davit on the command line, simply run davit followed by the directory you wish to serve up. You can optionally specify options from the list below.

Options

port: number - Port to bind server. Defaults to 3000.

host: string - The hostname to bind the server. Default to localhost.

root: string - Path to serve files from.

source: string - Let's you watch files from a different folder.

glyph: string - Prints next to the server address on startup :) Defaults to ♨.

verbose: boolean - Prints out every time a watch event fires. Defaults to false.

To specify these options in the CLI, simply either type --option where option is the name of the option or -o where o is the first letter of the option, followed by the value you'd like to pass. Boolean values don't take parameters, instead are flipped upon call.

Running Code before Reload

If you'd like to perform some actions before the watch service reloads the site, you can do so like this.

dv.watch('media/*.css', (fileName, fullPath) => {
	codeHere();
});

Disclaimer

In order to make live reloading work, davit inserts a script into the head tag of every html file it serves. The script will open up a web socket and connect back to davit so the browser can receive commands for the live reload. The full source code of this script can be found in src/live-reload/injection.js. Specifically in the function called payload.