The discussion revolves around the possibility of implementing hot reload for local Discourse plugin development. JQ331 initially asks if hot reload is available for local development, citing the slow reload time of over 5 seconds. merefield clarifies that only API changes require a server restart, while JavaScript and HBS file changes can be updated by refreshing the browser.
Falco mentions that hot reload is coming with the introduction of Ember CLI, and eviltrout confirms that it’s already possible to use Ember CLI with the latest Discourse version for hot reloading. eviltrout provides steps to set up Ember CLI for hot reloading.
However, JQ331 and merefield report issues with getting hot reload to work for HTML and JavaScript changes, despite following the steps. david explains that the issue lies in the fact that theme and plugin assets are compiled and served by the Rails app, not Ember CLI, which prevents automatic page refreshes for theme/plugin changes.
It’s unclear whether live reloading is expected to work beyond CSS changes, and merefield suggests that it might be a local browser configuration issue or another configuration issue. The discussion concludes that hot reload is not currently available for local Discourse plugin development, but it might be improved in the future.
Hi All. Apologies if this has been addressed (I didn’t find it):
Developing a discourse plugin on my local machine tends to be pretty slow. Each reload of my locally running app (to view code changes) takes over 5 seconds. So I make a change in an html/hbs or js file, hit save, then have to reload the app [edit: refresh the browser], and wait 5 seconds+ to view the change.
Is there any way to do hot reload (ie, automatic updating of the local view) for local discourse plugin development?
It seems like CSS files get updated automatically, but not html/hbs or js files.
I’m talking here about refreshing the browser, and whether hot reload is available to avoid having to do that. It’s the browser refresh that takes 5+ seconds to view any change.
If I have to stop and reload the server (in the case that I change plugin.rb, for instance), that probably takes 60 seconds.
Hot reload is of course the standard for developing with many technologies today (I’m most familiar with Angular, which has this standard), and is awesome for development. I believe with Rails it’s possible through webpack (but not sure about that). My sense is hot reload is not available for discourse development, but wanted to check 'cause it would be awesome if it was available.
That sounds great, thanks. To use this for local development, is there anything I need to do other than download the latest version of discourse from github onto my computer?
I was excited to upgrade my local discourse instance, and am now running 2.8 locally. But I am not yet able to get hot reload to work for html and js changes.
Here is how I run things:
cd into the discourse folder locally
$ redis-server //starts the server
$ rails s//starts the rails app
$ yarn//only run this the first time, I expect
$ bin/ember-cli//starts ember cli. The command ember serve--proxy "http://localhost:3000" gave me errors for some reason
This successfully has the app run at localhost:4200.
I have added in a plugin the local discourse instance, which is successfully displayed at localhost:4200. However, if I make changes to the html or js files, these changes are only displayed on the app running locally if I refresh the browser.
Do I have to do something else to have hot-reloading work?
Hi there. Is hot-reload available with ember-cli in Discourse? I am still having the same issue I mentioned in my previous post. Following those steps, I still do not get hot-reload (ie, I still have to refresh the browser to see changes to html and javascript, and ember-cli’s output in the terminal doesn’t seem to register when I hit save after a file change).
Would really appreciate being able to get live reloading (especially for javascript files). When I code in other contexts, where live reloading is standard, live reloading makes the coding process a lot faster and more fun.
" livereload.js initiates a websocket connection back to Ember CLI. This allows Ember CLI to notify the browser to trigger a refresh after JavaScript or style changes."
I’m curious why the browser ignores this - I wonder if it’s an option in the browser related to site security?
I’m not sure–but I’ve definitely been able to get live reload in the browser in other contexts / other frameworks. (Not sure about ember–I’ve only ever used it with coding discourse stuff.)
I’m interested to know if live reload is expected. It seems like yes, from the previous discussion. In that case, I wonder if the discourse team has live reload, and if they’re doing something I’m not.
Automatically refreshing the page is handled by ember CLI. At the moment, theme and plugin assets are compiled and served by the Rails app, not Ember CLI. Therefore theme/plugin changes don’t automatically refresh the page.
This might be something we can improve in the future. But for now, it’s expected behaviour.
