Reload code on refresh without server restart

[swlkr]

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[onemanstartup]

Does this implemented? I tried and it didn't work. However I can use external tool like entr - ls *.janet | entr -r janet main.janet, but I wouldn't want to rely on external tools if it could be avoided.

Ok. LOL. Found in the code that do the same thing with the same tool.

[swlkr]

Yeah entr is great!

I'm still not quite sure how I'd do this. It would be nice to start a websocket server and push updated html to the page you're working on, something like "hot reload" but I'm not sure if I care about the server reloading without restarting since restarts are so fast.

[aliaksandr-s]

Are there any updates on this? Maybe there is a way to at least refresh a browser tab when the code changes.

[swlkr]

I did manage to whip something up to refresh the tab, but the websockets thing would be cross platform/cross browser.

Here is what I did on macOS. I created two files, watch with chmod +x and refresh-tab.scptd:

watch looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

pkill -xf "janet src/app.janet"
sleep .5
janet src/app.janet &
osascript refresh-tab.scptd

refresh-tab looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/osascript

tell application "Safari"
    set docUrl to URL of document 1
    set URL of document 1 to docUrl
end tell

and then it gets called via fswatch which I wrapped up in a phony in project.janet:

(phony "watch" []
  (os/shell "fswatch -o . --exclude='.git' --exclude='.sqlite3' | xargs -n1 -I{} ./watch"))

I think I will take another shot at using websockets to reload html on the page with https://github.com/joy-framework/halo2 now that janet master has some async things so it might be possible to get websockets working in pure janet.

[matthewmcgarvey]

I noticed that generating a fresh app contains entr in the server command. I was surprised to find that the app wasn't reloading when I made changes though.

(phony "server" []
  (if (= "development" (os/getenv "JOY_ENV"))
    (os/shell "find . -name '*.janet' | entr janet main.janet")
    (os/shell "janet main.janet")))

I'm pretty sure that it is because when it calls os/getenv the .env file hasn't been loaded yet so it always evaluates to false. I got it working by changing it to this

(use joy)

(phony "server" []
  (if (= "development" (env :joy_env))
    (os/shell "find . -name '*.janet' | entr -r janet main.janet")
    (os/shell "janet main.janet")))

Instead of using os/getenv I use joy's env and there was a missing -r flag on the entr command