Hey there, I’m trying develop a custom theme/plugin which will add a few additional templates and some general styling to discourse. In pursuit of this, it would be great to get some kind of livereload/auto-injected CSS action going on, as reloading the page and wating 2s to notice I have made a typo is slowly adding up to quite a significant chunk of time. :slight_smile: It seems like the recommendation is to use autopec, but I’m a little confused as to how this is supposed to work. I have discourse setup and running locally using vagrant. I’ve ssh’d into the box and can run the server, see the admin page etc. Should I run autospec and then start the server? or vice-versa? Will this effectively work to live reload the CSS so that I don’t have to refresh the app? Or am I just completely off-base here? Any suggestions would be appreciated. :slight_smile:

[image] kara-todd: auto-injected CSS This already works, just click preview on the theme and it will update as you go.

Thanks @sam I think I wasn’t clear in this case. I’m not developing a theme in the CSS section of the admin panel. Rather, I’m creating a plugin which contains raw scss files which “themes” the discourse instance and also some of the custom elements that I will be injecting into outlets. So I have a css files being loaded by my plugin: plugin.rb register_asset "stylesheets/base-theme.scss" I’d really like to get these live reloading (similar to guard-livereload,) Developing in the admin isn’t really sustainable from my viewpoint as there are going to be several developers working on files and having version control / git commit flow process is a pretty high priority.

I think the live reloader should work as long as you launch puma lib/stylesheet/watcher.rb main require "listen" module Stylesheet class Watcher def self.watch(paths = nil) watcher = new(paths) watcher.start watcher end def initialize(paths) @paths = paths || Watcher.default_paths @queue = Queue.new end def self.default_paths return @default_paths if @default_paths @default_paths = ["app/assets/stylesheets"] Discourse.plugins.each do |plugin| if plugin.path.to_s.include?(Rails.root.to_s)

Ok. I think this my confusion. So for example, I start my server with bundle exec rails s -b 0.0.0.0 and then visit my local environment at http://127.0.0.1:4000/ (bound port through vagrant.) If I then make any changes to the scss I don’t see any changes until I manually refresh the page (which takes a few seconds.) If I understand correctly, puma should be running when I bundle exec rails and changes are being picked up but I just have to hit reload on the page… the styles are not injected into the app live… Am I missing a step?

I have been previously been developing a standalone ember app so I have been hopelessly spoiled by ember server :wink:

Try bundle exec puma, does it work? I will test out plugin live reload on Monday I may have missed something Certainly works for themes and discourse assets

Link me to the plugin repo you have, either here or via a pm so I have something to test :blush:

As an update to this @sam here’s what I’m seeing when I boot my server. I PM’d you details for the codebase I’m using. vagrant@discourse:/vagrant$ bundle exec rails s -b 0.0.0.0 => Booting Puma => Rails 4.2.8 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Run `rails server -h` for more startup options => Ctrl-C to shutdown server Staring CSS change watcher Puma starting in single mode... * Version 3.6.0 (ruby 2.3.1-p112), codename: Sleepy Sunday Serenity * Min threads: 0, max threads: 16 * Environment: development * Listening on tcp://0.0.0.0:3000D

I just confirmed that live-reload works fine with the plugin you linked me. The issue is vagrant. Vagrant mounts stuff in a terrible way and breaks inotify/kqueue file change notification. This leaves you stuck with all file watching broken from what I can see. I recommend you avoid vagrant and just do a local Discourse install. For my test, I checked out your plugin Ran bin/puma Edited header.scss and added `body { background-color: red !important; } The background turned red, no need to reload the page or anything.

Thanks Sam! I followed the instructions for setting up discourse locally and now it’s working for me as well. :smiley: This will make my life much easier so thank you very much for your time on this.

Is there a faster way to develop plugin theme CSS / JS (e.g. livereload)?

Development

sam (Sam Saffron) March 23, 2018, 7:47am 13

I am cleaning up my bookmarks, @eviltrout you do a lot of JS are you noticing any cache issues amending JS in plugins? Do we need to add an assets.path?

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Is there a faster way to develop plugin theme CSS / JS (e.g. livereload)?

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