This project is based on https://github.com/markbates/refresh. We used the tool for quite some time (thx for making and maintaining it so long!) but hit some harder issues with process management (clean shutdown) and issues with
fsnotify/fsnotifyon recent macOS versions. So this is once again a new re-iteration ;)
This simple command line application will watch your files, trigger a build of your Go binary and restart the application for you.
$ go install github.com/networkteam/refresh@latest
First you'll want to create a refresh.yml configuration file:
$ refresh init
If you want the config file in a different directory:
$ refresh init -c path/to/config.yml
Set it up the way you want, but I believe the defaults really speak for themselves, and will probably work for 90% of the use cases out there.
Once you have your configuration all set up, all you need to do is run it:
$ refresh run
That's it! Now, as you change your code the binary will be re-built and re-started for you.
# The root of your application relative to your configuration file.
app_root: .
# List of folders you don't want to watch. The more folders you ignore, the
# faster things will be.
ignored_folders:
- vendor
- log
- tmp
# List of file extensions you want to watch for changes.
included_extensions:
- .go
# The directory you want to build your binary in.
build_path: /tmp
# `notify` can trigger many events at once when you change files. To minimize
# unnecessary builds, a delay is used to ignore extra events until the delay passes after the first event.
build_delay: 200ms
# If you have a specific sub-directory of your project you want to build.
build_target_path : "./cmd/cli"
# What you would like to name the built binary.
binary_name: refresh-build
# Extra command line flags you want passed to the built binary when running it.
command_flags: ["--env", "development"]
# Extra environment variables you want defined when the built binary is run.
command_env: ["PORT=1234"]
# If you want colors to be used when printing out log messages.
enable_colors: true
# Enable a live reload server that pushes an SSE event to the client when the app was rebuilt.
live_reload: true
# A URL to check the readyness of the application before sending a reload event.
readyness_url: http://localhost:3000/healthzBackground: We want to have a proxy-less live-reload experience when working with HTML on the server (e.g. htmx).
If live_reload is enabled, refresh will start an HTTP server on a random port that sends SSE events when
the application was rebuilt. The client can listen to these events and trigger a reload of the page.
When readyness_url is set, refresh will check the URL to be healthy before sending the reload event.
If you want to enable live reload, you can add the following script to your HTML (e.g. using Go templates):
package main
func main() {
liveReloadScriptURL := os.Getenv("REFRESH_LIVE_RELOAD_SCRIPT_URL")
http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
data := struct {
LiveReloadScriptURL string
}{
LiveReloadScriptURL: liveReloadScriptURL,
}
tmpl.Execute(w, data)
})
// ...
}<body>
{{ if ne .LiveReloadScriptURL "" }}
<script src="{{ .LiveReloadScriptURL }}"></script>
{{ end }}
</body>Or you can handle the SSE events yourself using REFRESH_LIVE_RELOAD_SSE_EVENT (for the event name) and REFRESH_LIVE_RELOAD_SSE_URL (for the SSE endpoint) environment variables.