Awesome-live-reloading – A collection of live reloading tools and libraries | Hacker News Reader

Awesome-live-reloading – A collection of live reloading tools and libraries

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55 pointswawhal13 comments

I'm surprised not to see generic tools on this list which make use of event-based file system notifications such as dnotify and inotify. See https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki or inotifywait (https://superuser.com/a/959040) for examples.

I know this particular API (inotify) is specific to Linux (there might be similiar APIs on other OS). But it is awesome for all kind of build systems, for instance latex documents.

http://livereload.com/ is an excellent tool (though paid) along these lines.

I will think about adding generic tools along with an articles section about how hot reloading works and what are the related new technologies.

Thanks for pointing out.

Oh I love inotify-wait. So many times I'll start trying to be clever, then delete the whole thing and replace it with inotify-wait

The origin of this list was when we were creating documentation for live-reloading code you write on your computer, and syncing those files to your cloud dev/staging environment directly. We then realised that there was no central repo of "live-reloading" tools for different languages/frameworks.

There's a slew of new tools coming out that are making this trend popular (skaffold, ksync, hasura). Some of which need your framework to have live-reloading and some don't.

I'm wondering what the HN community thinks about this general trend of pushing this write/test loop to a hosted dev environment. I think it's a response to increased complexity of bring up a full "microservices" environment on your local machine.

I've actually been using a fully hosted dev environment for about a year and a half now for my side projects and it works really well. I started by using Cloud9, then after I had some difficulties with the switch to AWS Cloud9, I spun up a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet with my entire dev system on it. I use vim and tmux to replicate the classic IDE feel of paned windows. I keep a very minimal tmux config and vimrc so it's super-compatible across machines.

DO does cheap backups for me so in case I hose something I can quickly restore, my code is on GitHub so it can be pulled back down, and I can get to it from basically any machine I own with nothing installed locally. Just the ability to SSH is all I need. I've connected from a Chromebook and an iPad/iPhone variously to do small bug fixes and quick push to production while I was away. I can get away with a cheaper/older dev machine because my local specs don't matter. If my tests are going to run long... who cares? It's not running on my machine, so I can close the lid and walk away if I need to, and it will keep running.

https://github.com/johnno1962/injectionforxcode for IOS apps. I'd submit a pull request but i'm lazy.

Unless we are dealing with a list just strictly for frontend development(webpack/sass/etc), I'm kinda confused about the list. What about servers and daemons that perform "hot-reload" for you? And fsevents / inotify are the way to go, otherwise you will deal with 1~10+ seconds reloads, which can be miserable at times.

Or just use Clojure and get live coding for free. Its far more powerful than hot reloading.

Haha. Do you think live coding is cool enough a feature to move to a particular language?

Yes, it's easily one of the most compelling language "features" (in quotes because its something more fundamental than that) you can have.

Unfortunately, management almost never sees it that way.

I was expecting single stage presses, neck dies, powder dribblers, and Sierra load manuals, live. Disappointed.

I feel your pain

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