vite_ruby VS chokidar

With the recent release of Bun and its newfound support for Vite, coupled with Ruby on Rails 7.1 incorporating native support for Bun, developers can now enhance their web development workflow significantly. Here is the effortless process of enabling Bun for Vite Ruby, ultimately streamlining your front-end builds.

Vite, in particular, ViteRuby is a solid option. It sits between ESBuild and Webpacker, and if you're looking at Webpacker, Vite may actually be a better option for you. It is a very solid option, and I've enjoyed using Vite personally.

Yep. vite_rails (website/GitHub) is the way to go.

Use vite with https://vite-ruby.netlify.app/ if you don’t go the inertia route.

--skip-javascript is necessary for avoiding conflicts on the next steps. In case of bootstrap/foundation-sites the asset pipeline is helpful so --skip-asset-pipeline is not applied.

Vite Ruby is an umbrella project with libraries that will allow you to easily integrate Vite at your favourite Ruby framework, such as Rails or Hanami, or a plain Rack app. If you are tired of waiting for webpack to compile, this project might be for you. ​ Vite.js in Ruby ## Why Vite? 🤔 Vite does not bundle your code during development, which means the dev server is extremely fast to start, and your changes will be updated instantly thanks to HMR. This is great when adjusting styles, or tweaking behavior in JS. In production, Vite bundles your code with tree-shaking, lazy-loading, and common chunk splitting out of the box, to achieve optimal loading performance. ## Why Vite in Ruby? 🤔 Vite is great on its own, but configuring it correctly to work for a Ruby app structure requires knowledge of its internals. By following existing Rails and Rack conventions, and adding a few of its own, it becomes possible for ⠀everyone to leverage Vite and its wonderful features! If you are curious about the difference, check this Jumpstart Rails template.

Vite Rails Docs

It something that basically doesn't work properly since the birth of Rails, 15 years ago. For beginners, this is a big disappointment. You have to tweak Guard-livereload (tricky and not always working, as you mentionned), or try things like browserSync (also tricky, also not always working...) My advice so far : keep Sprockets, in order to have a nice integration with older gems. And completly remove the current js-bundling + importmaps. Instead, replace with the gem 'vite_rails' (repo here : https://github.com/ElMassimo/vite_ruby).

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.