esbuild-rails VS chokidar

Here's the setup I use for reloading with esbuild: https://github.com/excid3/esbuild-rails/blob/main/examples/esbuild.config.mjs

// config/esbuild.mjs import path from 'path' import esbuild from 'esbuild' import rails from 'esbuild-rails' import babel from 'esbuild-plugin-babel' esbuild .build({ bundle: true, // Path to application.js folder absWorkingDir: path.join(process.cwd(), 'app/javascript'), // Application.js file, used by Rails to bundle all JS Rails code entryPoints: ['application.js'], // Destination of JS bundle, points to the Rails JS Asset folder outdir: path.join(process.cwd(), 'app/assets/builds'), // Enables watch option. Will regenerate JS bundle if files are changed watch: process.argv.includes('--watch'), // Split option is disabled, only needed when using multiple input files // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#splitting (change it if using multiple inputs) splitting: false, chunkNames: 'chunks/[name]-[hash]', // Remove unused JS methods treeShaking: true, // Adds mapping information so web browser console can map bundle errors to the corresponding // code line and column in the real code // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#sourcemap sourcemap: process.argv.includes('--development'), // Compresses bundle // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#minify minify: process.argv.includes('--production'), // Removes all console lines from bundle // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#drop drop: process.argv.includes('--production') ? ['console'] : [], // Build command log output: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#log-level logLevel: 'info', // Set of ESLint plugins plugins: [ // Plugin to easily import Rails JS files, such as Stimulus controllers and channels // https://github.com/excid3/esbuild-rails rails(), // Configures bundle with Babel. Babel configuration defined in babel.config.js // Babel translates JS code to make it compatible with older JS versions. // https://github.com/nativew/esbuild-plugin-babel babel() ] }) .catch(() => process.exit(1))

Finally, if you're using esbuild with Rails and Stimulus, you'll probably find the esbuild-rails plugin from Chris Oliver useful.

For this, we'll use chokidar - more specifically the chokidar-cli package. chokidar is probably the most useful file watching library for the nodejs ecosystem and it will serve us well.

tailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number

is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.

[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...

The watching magic is really in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar library

> It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.

You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.

Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues

Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change.

So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be revisited later on.

Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.

The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.

OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.

Next, you can use a library like chokidar to listen for changes in your source directory. Create a ws server, and whenever a file changes, send a message.

As another has mentioned, nodemon uses chokidar under the hood for the actual file watching part.

At the end of the day, ironically, Nodemon does not even implement file watching functionality. It is a thin wrapper around chokidar (see source code), and the way it is being used is neither efficient (CPU and your battery usage) or performant. So it is not a false argument, just perhaps not the most appealing.

for file watching, it might use something similar to https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar

First, we need to install chokidar to enable watching and automatically refreshing our files.