Serviette

Serviette is a javascript port of Gary Bernhardt's useful ServeIt tool. Briefly, it is a web server that serves content off the local file system. Before each request, it checks to see if any of the files have changed; if they have, it runs the build command, waits for the build command to complete, and then serves the appropriate file.

Usage

Usage: serviette [options] [--] [<cmd>...]

Options:
  --serve=DIR    The root directory to serve. [default: .]
  -h --help      Show this help.

e.g. to serve the current directory at http://localhost:3000 as a purely static site, run:

$ serviette

To have it run make when you refresh the page, use:

$ serviette 'make'

If all your stuff is built into the "dist" subdirectory, then you can limit the browsing to just that directory:

$ serviette --serve=dist make

Why?

Because ServeIt doesn't run well on Windows, and I needed to run on Windows. (In particular, scanning my directory of 22k files took many seconds, and running the build command caused it to hang. Yuck.)