feathers-service-reloader

feathers-service-reloader is a plugin designed for FeathersJS v5 applications, enabling real-time service reloading during development. It watches specified service files for changes and dynamically reloads them without requiring a full restart of your FeathersJS app. This is especially useful for a smooth development workflow, where changes to service files, schemas, and shared modules are immediately applied.

Note: This package specifically handles changes to service files only, allowing you to apply modifications to your services without restarting the entire application. As the number of services in a project grows, restarting the whole application with tools like nodemon can take several seconds. With feathers-service-reloader, individual services reload in milliseconds, making development faster and more efficient.

Compatibility: This package is designed to work exclusively with FeathersJS v5.

Features

• Watches FeathersJS service files for changes
• Automatically reloads modified services
• Clears module cache to apply the latest updates
• Removes AJV schemas and reloads them dynamically

Installation

Install the package via npm:

npm install feathers-service-reloader --save-dev

Usage

Add feathers-service-reloader as a plugin in your FeathersJS v5 application to enable dynamic service reloading.

Example

import { serviceReloader } from 'feathers-service-reloader';

const app: Application = express(feathers())

// Initialize the service reloader plugin
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') {
  serviceReloader(app)
}

Configuration

feathers-service-reloader uses a default configuration to watch for changes in *.class.ts, *.schema.ts, *.shared.ts, and *.ts files within the services directory. When a change is detected, the service is automatically reloaded, and AJV schemas associated with the service are removed and refreshed.

Updating validators.ts

To ensure proper schema reloading, make sure that dataValidator in your validators.ts file is set up as follows:

export const dataAjv = new Ajv({});
export const dataValidator: Ajv = addFormats(dataAjv, formats);

Recommended dev Script

To prevent nodemon from restarting your application when files in the src/services/ directory are modified, you can use the following dev script in your package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "cross-env NODE_ENV=development nodemon --ignore src/services/ -x ts-node src/index.ts",
  }
}

This setup will ignore changes in the src/services/ directory, allowing feathers-service-reloader to handle those changes without restarting the entire application.

API

serviceReloader(app) app: Your FeathersJS application instance. This function takes in a FeathersJS app instance and sets up file watching on the specified service files.

How It Works

• File Watching: The plugin watches for changes in specified files (class, schema, shared, and .ts).
• Module Cache Clearing: It clears the require cache, ensuring that the latest version of the modified files is loaded.
• Schema Update: Uses AJV's removeSchema method to delete outdated schemas, allowing the latest ones to be applied on reload.