Live Updating in Development

I spent some time over the last couple days pushing a new redesign of my site, and one of the things I’ve been meaning to do is set up a better live development process. By that, I mean that when you’re writing code, there’s a tool for pretty much every programming language to assist you in reloading, running test suites, re-building, etc.

These tools exist not because they’re a quirky thing some people use; they exist because they make better code.

The most prevalent of these in my toolchain is Guard, a Ruby tool for “easily handling events on file system modifications”. In short, this means that using a fairly simple regular expression syntax, you can piece together systems for dealing with file changes: for example, if lib/my_class.rb changes, run spec/my_class_spec.rb. Guard has a crazy amount of plugins, including tools for testing (Rspec, Cucumber, MiniTest, etc.), building (SASS, static sites like Jekyll), and miscellaneous Ruby-specific tools (running a Rails server, installing gems on Gemfile changes). I’ve had good luck just sifting through GitHub search for “Guard”, specifically for Ruby.

At work, we’ve had some good luck with Gruntjs in our Ember projects. Though Grunt is a bit more open-ended in its goals compared to Guard, the basic file system modification idea is identical. Check out Ember App Kit’s Gruntfile for some examples of this.

More generally, LiveReload is a killer tool that I use for developing this site. LiveReload connects through the browser and will refresh the page intelligently on changes. Check out the (simple) implementation I have for this website in my Guardfile, using guard-livereload.

I’m sure I’m missing a ton of these - my knowledge is pretty based in Ruby and JS so I’m sure there’s a whole slew of tools in different languages. The point is, use these! As I said, these tools exist because they have nothing but net-gain on your development process: you’ll save time by being able to rapidly run tests, re-build your code, etc. Especially if you’re writing in Ruby or a Rails app, you’re going to see huge gains pretty quickly after implementing the default Guardfile for an Rspec configuration. Go go go!