Auto-inject the LiveReload script

[tomek-he-him]

Hi!

What I liked about http://npm.im/livereloadx was that it had an option to inject the LiveReload script to all HTML documents it served.

It doesn’t look that hard to do, given this little module: https://github.com/mattdesl/inject-lr-script. I’ll try to help you implement it this evening (European time) if you like the idea.

[tomek-he-him]

I’ll try to help you implement it this evening (European time)

Unfortunately that won’t work out today – other things cropped up. But it’s on my todo list if you give the green light!

[henrytseng]

I'm not fully convinced that this would be a good idea for the project. The goal of hostr is to be lightweight quick utility.

Bare with me but, it appears to me that what you're looking for might be outside the scope of this project.

If you're working on a larger project then wouldn't you want a ton of more utilities to compliment your work flow? Such as, JS/CSS minification, image processing, HTML templating, and etc. I would recommend a gulp task runner in that case.

I would say that hostr is really for cutting and pasting files into a quick folder and running to give it a quick test to say ... experiment with something like Bootstrap or jQuery or Polymer that wouldn't merit more than a few seconds of your time to set up a test project?

Let me know your thoughts.

[tomek-he-him]

👍 And that’s what I’m looking for as well! I love tools which do one tiny thing well. I don’t want to stick processing in here – there are other tools for that in case I need it.

But – since hostr serves LiveReload anyway – I still think it would be good to integrate LiveReload. It’s a tiny thing, still in focus. It saves anyone using hostr:

• either a click every time he starts his server
• or initial setup.

Of course the feature could be optional, behind a flag.

But I don’t insist. If you don’t agree, just close the issue :)

[tomek-he-him]

I thought about it once more today – and have two more thoughts to keep the discussion going:

• At least 90% of our users want LiveReload – otherwise they’d use something simpler like https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server. So I guess perfect support for LiveReload should be our focus.
• At the moment – when I want hostr+LiveReload in any browser (IE, mobile browsers, Chrome at a friend’s box etc.) – I manually copy+paste the script snippet to every file I serve this way. That’s the opposite the of “pasting files into a quick folder and running to give it a quick test” philosophy. I could automate the script injection with gulp or something – but that would be even further against that philosophy!

All in all – I agree that keeping a very tight and focused scope is a good thing for any project. That’s what drew me to hostr by the way! But I still think the snippet injection fits in the scope perfectly. As I see it, it’s part of “doing one thing and doing it well.”

[tomek-he-him]

That means you don’t like the idea, @henrytseng – doesn’t it?

[tomek-he-him]

I don’t insist. But have a look at budo – it’s an equivalent of hostr for quickly serving JS files to browsers. Drop any JS file, get results quickly.

I do value discussion however. I’m not a monologue guy.

[henrytseng]

Actually, I do like the idea in principle but I want to implement it through plugins instead. How's about I keep this issue open. There's a lot of preprocessing done on the front-end files so it would be nice to be able to include a list of plugins you wanted to process your files with. I've been playing around with ReactJS and thinking about this. I'll keep this issue open instead.

[tomek-he-him]

👍 thanks for the answer! I’m glad you like the idea :) Plugins are definitely the way to go!