Streamline Your Development Process with Live Reload
As developers, we know that writing code quickly isn’t our only concern. Getting feedback quickly, while we’re coding, is also crucial to maintaining a rapid pace of development. The code we produce should be valuable and reliable, but how do we ensure that? By automating the “run it” part of our development pipeline, we can create a faster and more seamless workflow.
What is Live Reload?
Live reload is an automated approach to restarting our application during development. It enables our app to automatically and simultaneously pick up code changes while we’re coding, saving us from countless manual and tedious restarts.
Setting Up for Live Reload
To get started with live reload, we’ll explore various full-stack techniques to automate the “run it” part of our development pipeline. We’ll cover setting up live reload with Node.js and nodemon, implementing live reload with TypeScript, and using live reload in the frontend with Parcel and webpack.
Scaling Live Reload for Improved Performance
Live reload can have a dramatic effect on our performance. Not only does it automate the boring and tedious manual reload, but it can also be scaled up across the many processes that comprise our application, resulting in a large overall improvement.
Using Live Reload in Production vs. Development
Before we dive into the implementation details, it’s essential to note that live reload techniques are only meant to be used in development. Our needs for production are quite different, and we want safe, secure, and optimized Docker images where the code is baked into the image and immutable.
Live Reload in Action
Let’s explore some examples of live reload in action:
- Live Reload with Node.js and nodemon: We’ll use nodemon to automatically restart our Node.js application when code changes are detected.
- Live Reload with TypeScript: We’ll use ts-node to run our TypeScript code directly without compiling it first, making it easier to work with TypeScript during development.
- Live Reload in the Frontend with Parcel: Parcel’s inbuilt dev server will take care of live reload for us, making it easy to get started with live reload in the frontend.
- Live Reload in the Frontend with webpack: We’ll configure webpack to use live reload with its development server.
- Live Reload of JavaScript Code in a Docker Container: We’ll use nodemon to restart our Node.js application inside a Docker container, making it easy to scale up live reload to larger microservices applications.
- Live Reload of TypeScript Code in a Docker Container: We’ll use ts-node to run our TypeScript code directly inside a Docker container, making it easy to work with TypeScript in a microservices application.
By incorporating live reload into our development process, we can create a faster and more efficient workflow. With the right tools and techniques, we can streamline our development process and focus on building high-quality applications.