entr VS modd

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]

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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

There's also modd[0] which allows for many file watch pattern -> command combos to easily be defined & run simultaneously from a modd.conf file.

[0]https://github.com/cortesi/modd

i was using cortesi/modd for this while using docker. Since I change to Rancher with dockerd i wasn’t able to get live reloading working again, i also tried air but no luck.. out of curiosity did anyone have a similar issue?

Interesting. I've been using https://github.com/cortesi/modd for this for a while but I'll check this project out.

me likes: https://github.com/cortesi/modd A little more flexible for various files

I use a somewhat similar approach for Pirsch [0]. It's build so that I can run it locally, basically as a fully fledged staging environment. Databases run in Docker, everything else is started using modd [1]. This has proven to be a good setup for quick iterations and testing. I can quickly run all tests on my laptop (Go and TypeScript) and even import data from production to see if the statistics are correct for real data. Of course, there are some things that need to be mocked, like automated backups, but so fare it turns out to work really well.

You can find more on our blog [2] if you would like to know more.

[0] https://pirsch.io

[1] https://github.com/cortesi/modd

[2] https://pirsch.io/blog/techstack/

This pair of tools do both front-end and back-end live reloading with a small amount of config: https://github.com/cortesi/modd https://github.com/cortesi/devd