air VS entr

Note: Make sure you have Air installed. See 👉 How to install Air

The last problem for now is a hot reload module. Whenever we create a fiber app we don't have any change listener by default. If fiber has this already and I do not know about it then forgive me for that I am relatively new to this. If you know anything about this, let me know in the comments. To solve this problem I figured out to include air in the project.

We will use https://github.com/air-verse/air to do live reloading for us.

Ever since I have been making APIs there was always a simple way to enable hot reloading. It is easy in Go too, you just have to use air. It so simple, just write air and you have hot reloading. Now you may ask the question that if it's so great what this post is for?

Air is another library that enables hot reloading in Go applications. To use it, install it on your machine using the command below:

To enable live reloading in Go we will checkout the command tool, Air - Live reload for Go apps.

☁️ Repositório do Air

This is made possible thanks to the Air tool, which now comes with every project you create. The configuration is as follows:

entr, A utility for running arbitrary commands when files change, yes basically this bad boy lets you run any command (or bunch of them as will cover in Makefile) when files change.

This is the same TUI app workflow I've settled on in other languages. Three notes:

- entr is a good livereload tool: https://eradman.com/entrproject/. I prefer to wrap the livereload scripts in a Makefile, under something like `make dev`.

- Managing layout arithmetic by yourself is a real pain. A widget abstraction like Bubbletea's is very helpful. Also, don't forget about weird Unicode characters (eg. emoji) potentially breaking width calculations.

- Since this follows the Elm architecture, consider storing your data the Elm way into one big, flat Model. Elm webapps turn into headaches when you split state among submodels. I think the same happens in TUI apps. I'm glad the author found a solution with a tree of models and message passing. But personally, I'd rather have a Model with 100 fields than the complexity of sumbodels.

Do I really need a whole Go library to do that? There must be a lighter or in other words Linux solution. I came across few solutions but not all had the capability to handle all types of directory changes. I wanted to be able to watch for file: create, edit, move, delete. For example entr doesn't rerun the command when a new file is added to the directory that is being watched.

entr ("Event Notify Test Runner"; GitHub), is a command-line tool written by Eric Radman that allows running arbitrary commands whenever files change.

Try entr for fast reloading. Another one is hupper.