Precompile on file changes

[simpleshadow]

As a developer, it's cumbersome to constantly open the terminal and call ember-precompile while building templates. I want ember-precompile to have a watch feature to detect file changes of a specific directory or file and precompile the output to a specified directory.

This functionality can be found in the node module Fuse (https://github.com/smebberson/fuse#on-the-command-line).

[gabrielgrant]

I agree that this is a useful feature, but I'm not sure that it belongs inside ember-precompile itself: I think it may be better to rely on external tools. Personally, I use PRO with ember-precompile all the time (the example in the README actually contains a line for handlebars)

Do you think maybe just adding a pointer into the ember-precompile README could work?

[simpleshadow]

I just submitted a pull request that adds this support.

It's fairly unforgiving if your template has a syntax error; I should add better error handling in the future.

[Blackshawk]

I agree with @gabrielgrant that watch functionality doesn't belong here. It seems useful at first glance but there are a plethora of existing solutions for this that can easily integrate.

[simpleshadow]

Fair enough. Several other node-based CLI tools I've used have this feature. Thought I'd add it here too since it wasn't much effort.

[Blackshawk]

I understand - maybe its just me but I feel like node tools in general don't put enough effort into depending on each to handle common tasks (like watching). This is something that other ecosystems like Ruby, Python, and PHP have done very well - I would like to see JS tools achieve the same level of inter-support.