Replace live-server with browser-sync

[mourner]

Batfish depends on https://github.com/tapio/live-server, which seems unmaintained — it hasn't received any updates for a year. It also causes issues when installing Batfish on Node v10 because of an old chokidar dependency (which in turn depends on an old fsevents version which doesn't compile). cc @davidtheclark

[davidtheclark]

Thanks for tracking down the Node 10 problem, @mourner. We'll look into alternatives. I'd love to avoid having to write a bunch of custom code for this (as budo does),and would also love to use a generic dependency instead of webpack-dev-server; but we're having trouble finding robust generic options that aren't (like browser-sync) way more than we need. And we have users who will protest strongly if we drop the live-reloading feature.

@kepta can you look into alternatives and figure out what looks best? We'd want to use the same thing for Batfish and for Underreact.

[kepta]

I tried to find a perfect replacement for live-server, but it looks like there is no perfect solution.

We'll look into alternatives. I'd love to avoid having to write a bunch of custom code for this (as budo does),

@davidtheclark I am not sure if by ^^ you mean - budo authors choice to ditch tiny-lr see mattdesl/budo#194. From what I get reading the ticket and this code here, they ended up ditching tiny-lr but are still using the livereload script by injecting it in their HTML response.

I think a pragmatic solution would be to create a new package which uses tiny-lr and a static file server as a replacement for live-server. tiny-lr is quite popular and is used by big projects like gitbook , ember-cli, ionic, facebook/Docusaurus and even documentation.js. So I guess we can consider it to be fairly reliable.

One downside, also mentioned in mattdesl/budo#194, tiny-lr is a bit old and feature development is not very active.

What do you guys think?

[davidtheclark]

@kepta How long do you think it would take to create a timeboxed proof of concept? That might be a place to start.

[kepta]

As per our last discussion, we have decided to move towards webpack-dev-server as a replacement for live-server. This might be easy for certain projects, but not exactly sure how much of a lift it would be for batfish.

[jseppi]

Since yesterday, I have been seeing Error: Cannot find module 'opn' when running batfish build.

I get that error during the batfish build. I can reproduce consistently by running: rm -rf node_modules && npm install && npm run build

The error gets resolved if I do a second npm install and npm run build.

opn is a dependency of live-server, which is a dependency of batfish. It was happening a bunch yesterday, then stopped for a bit, and now it is back again.

I also tried adding opn directly to my project's package.json, which fixed that specific Cannot find module error, but then the same error happened for a different live-server dependency.

Edit: The Cannot find module errors happen on Node v6.11.1, but do not happen on Node v8.x

[davidtheclark]

I think that we should revert to using browser-sync. Although it's an unnecessarily large dependency, we don't have a viable alternative. I will change the title of this issue to be specific about that.