Get HMR running

[grabbou]

Get HMR up & running. If supported by default, we should make a flag --hot on a CLI. I believe that switch from Dev Tools is rather useless. All in all, you don't want to change it during development.

Eventually we might want to change dev tools in Simulator as well (given that it's been recently allowed), but we will see.

[grabbou]

Not a top priority to me for now as I never used HMR in React Native, partially because it's default implementation is rather poor to me.

We might want to implement it after going alpha.

Also, might be a good first task for outside collaborators, should be fairly easy to do with a standard Webpack setup.

[Kerumen]

it's default implementation is rather poor to me

Can you elaborate? I find it very useful and it works well. If you are in a deep nested screen of your app, you don't have to retraverse the whole app each time you edit a fontSize.

[SEAPUNK]

Will implementing HMR via react-hot-loader 3 work?

I attempted to get it working locally once (we glued react-native's packager and webpack together via react-native-webpack-server), but the only problem I had was making the webpack dev client work, since the code ran in a worker context, and that had some weird issues.

[grabbou]

@SEAPUNK technically it should, feel free to give it a go and share your haul config!

@Kerumen it works, but I was referring to this part specifically facebook/react-native#10991 (comment)

[migueloller]

I tried setting up react-hot-loader v3. The only issue I ran into was the inability to do something like ReactDOM.render on React Native. Doesn't look like AppRegistry offers something similar.

Any ideas?

[satya164]

Probably just a this.forceUpdate() will work?

[satya164]

Or something like,

export default class App extends Component {
  state = { root: App };

  componentWillMount() {
    if (module.hot) {
      module.hot.accept('./App.js', () =>
        this.setState({ root: require('./App.js').default })
      );
    }
  }

  render() {
    return React.createElement(this.state.root); 
  }
}

[migueloller]

@satya164, yup! I realized this soon after the comment. 😅

The issue I'm running into now is that webpack-dev-middleware doesn't come with HMR support out of the box. Based on Webpack 2 docs, the hot options isn't compatible with webpack-dev-middleware.

See here.

[satya164]

Yes, we'll need to use webpack-hot-middleware - https://github.com/glenjamin/webpack-hot-middleware

[migueloller]

I played around with webpack-hot-middleware for a bit. It doesn't work quite nicely out of the box.

I was able to get HMR set up but for some reason requests to the manifests were timing out. Check out this PR.

Also, to get it working without having to use remote JS debugging, we'll have to add a polyfill for window.EventSource to satisfy this.

EDIT: It looks like a custom HMR middleware will be needed.

[zamotany]

I checked metro-bundler code and found that react-native adds HMR handler which probably sends HRM bundle as a JSON string via WebSocket: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/328d8ddb4781dc270d065aa45033b6be565b2c8f/local-cli/server/util/attachHMRServer.js#L202-L389

In this case we would definitely need a custom HMR middleware.

[zamotany]

As you can see in https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/Libraries/Utilities/HMRClient.js#L32-L137, when HMR is enabled by clicking Enable Hot Reloading RN app will connect to WebSocket under path /hot, whenever change in source file is detected Haul's custom HMR middleware should send JSON.stringify({ type: 'update-start' }) message via this websocket, then create body of HMR update, send it and then update-done. The source of how this all is done is here and as you can see it calls to few functions from metro-bundler: https://github.com/facebook/metro-bundler/blob/master/packages/metro-bundler/src/Server/index.js#L311-L361

We don't need any react-hot-loader since it's bundled with RN staring from version 0.22 or sth like that. You can read about implementation in this article: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2016/03/24/introducing-hot-reloading.html

So in order to support HMR we need to write custom middleware that will create a bridge between webpack and HMR client. As in the mentioned article, implementation is similar to Webpack HMR API so it should be a matter of copy/pasting and tweaking it a little bit.

You can track progress on this matter here: https://github.com/callstack-io/haul/compare/feature/hmr

[zamotany]

Done in #182

[grabbou]

@alloy Do you have any feedback regarding initial HMR setup that you made? I heard (not sure it was you) that it's non trivial. Is there anything we can do in order to improve it?

[orta]

I struggled to get it working with Storybooks, which is our main development environment and eventually ran out of my timebox'd time. Our RN app exposes many AppRegistry.registerComponent so I needed to handle it manually and I couldn't figure out how to make the root exposed module be one that comes from a module.

[grabbou]

CC: @zamotany who authored this module. Guys, let's sync on Slack and figure it out.