watchify-server

This is a bare-bones development server for watchify. For a more feature-rich development server built on the same underlying modules, see budo.

Features at a glance:

• serves a default HTML index
• browserifies your entry file with incremental rebuilding
• serves your static files on port 9966 or the next available port
• suspends server response until the build is finished, so you are never served a stale or empty bundle
• logs build timing to stdout with ndjson
• build errors will be printed to the browser console by default

Install

npm install watchify-server [-g|--save]

Example

Example with CLI:

watchify-server index.js --port 8000 --dir public/

It might look like this with npm scripts and garnish for pretty-printing:

  "devDependencies": {
    "watchify-server": "^1.0.0",
    "garnish": "^2.3.0"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "watchify-server src/app.js --port 8000 --dir public | garnish"
  }

Usage

Typically this module is used via a CLI, but it also exposes a simple JavaScript API.

CLI

Usage:
  watchify-server entry.js [options] -- [browserify]

Options:
  --port, -p          port to listen on, default 9966
  --host, -h          host to listen on, default localhost
  --dir, -d           directory for static content, default process.cwd()
  --no-debug          turns off source maps
  --no-error-handler  turns off syntax error handling
  --index             optional file path to override default index.html
  --title             title of HTML index
  --css, -s           optional style sheet href, relative to --dir

Browserify options are passed after the -- full stop.

The --title and --css arguments are only applicable to the default index.html handler.

API

Note: The API does not set any default config on the browserify instance, so it is up to the developer to set debug, packageCache, and cache.

server = watchifyServer(browserify, opt, [cb])

Creates a new watchify server that wraps the specified browserify instance. Options:

• entry (required) the path to the entry file to browserify
• silent set to true to disable logs

Other options are passed to watchify-middleware and serves, but defaults port to 9966 and errorHandler to true.

The returned server emits 'update' events from watchify-middleware.

The callback takes the form callback(err, ev) with the following event parameters when the server starts listening:

{
  url: String  // 'http://localhost:8080/' 
  port: Number // 8080 
  host: String // 'localhost' 
}

server = watchifyServer.fromArgs(browserifyArgs, [opt], [cb])

Creates a new watchify server from the given command-line browserify args array, with optional opt overrides and a callback.

The entry is resolved by browserify arg parsing, so opt is optional and cb can be passed as the second parameter.

See Also

• budo - a more feature-rich development server (live reload, browser launching, better error reporting, etc)
• watchify-middleware - the underlying middleware for pending server requests
• serves - the underlying server utility for this tool
• simple-html-index - the default HTML index used in this tool
• inject-lr-script - may be useful for injecting LiveReload into the index handler

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.