dew VS entr

I've built dew for this. It "knows" about many of those apps (and where to get a container from). https://github.com/efrecon/dew. Adding a term app is usually just a matter of crafting an .env file with the necessary settings.

I have written dew (https://github.com/efrecon/dew) for more or less the same purpose. I hardly keep any binary (and dependency) in my installation, they are all inside containers that I can easily dispose of at any time. The default in dew is to run them as your user. At the command prompt, instead of running, for example, kubectl xxx, I run dew kubectl xxx. It's a bit slower but provides an increased level of security.

In the past few weeks, I have spent some time and released dew [0]. It helps encapsulating this kind of setups in configuration and minimising typing. dew is still evolving, but it has served me well.

[0]: https://github.com/efrecon/dew

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

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Try entr for fast reloading. Another one is hupper.

entr