execute tasks on over "mainWindow.reload()"

[scottcorgan]

Running a linter before every test run is a practice that's become a habit for me. Would there be an easy way to include a way to execute given tasks before the main window reloads?

[mattdesl]

Could be a pretty neat browserify transform or plugin! Would be useful outside of hihat as well. Just prints lint errors to console in the same way that error handling currently re-writes the bundle.

[scottcorgan]

Interesting to make it a plugin. How would the linter push the results to the console?

[mattdesl]

Hmm, for example running eslint programmatically on **/*.js files in the current working dir. A browserify plugin do something similar to what hihat does now for error reporting. See errorify for a more detailed implementation.

I'm open to other ideas, though. If there was a "pre-run" task like a child process, how would it send errors and details to the DevTools console? Maybe just using webContents.executeJavaScript?

[scottcorgan]

Well, I suppose since Electron is on unified event loop, spawning a child task and checking its exit code shouldn't be overwhelmingly complicated.

Maybe before calling mainWindow.reload(), a set of tasks to run good be executed, followed by the reload() call. (https://github.com/Jam3/hihat/blob/master/index.js#L141).

I guess the question to give it context is in which environment do the tasks get executed, the mainWindow or the terminal session?

[mattdesl]

I made a prototype using standard since it has a pretty easy API.
https://github.com/mattdesl/standardify

hihat index.js -- -p standardify

It probably wouldn't be much harder to do the same with eslint or your favourite linter. The DOM stuff is not necessary in your case and you could prettify the console logs a bit if you are mainly targeting chrome/hihat.

The child task idea is pretty cool, too. It might be useful for various things other than linting. It could just pipe the process' stdout (or stderr?) into the DevTools console.