simple-css-hmr

Simple css hmr

Simple css hmr provides a simple way of automatically refreshing css in the browser, whenever the source file changes. This can be extremely useful with homegrown frameworks that doesn't support webpack hmr. Pages that uses these frameworks can often take a while to instantiate. Or it might be useful simply because the part of the page that is currently being designed takes a while to open due to some complex state that needs to be created, say a very dynamic editor.

Configure the client

To use simple css hmr a couple of small changes are needed in the client.

First, you need to either add dist/main.js to the page, or include it using a bundler like webpack. If you are using a module system like amd, commonjs or es6 modules, then the library also supports imports these ways. Simple import the dist file.

Once that is done, a single method call to setupCssHmr is all that is needed:

setupCssHmr({
    hmrLink: 'ws://localhost:8796',
    cssLinkTagSelector: '#replaceable-css-link'
});

hmrLink is the websocket link to the server, see 'Configure the server'.
cssLinkTagSelector is a selector to get link that currently loads the css file. see example.

Configure the server

The server can be configured in two ways, either using the command line interface or programmatically.

Via cli

To setup the server using the cli, do simple-css-hmr <filename> where <filename> is the name of the build css file that should be watched. e.g. simple-css-hmr example/text.css.
If your css file name changes after each build, (e.g. webpack file hashes) then you can also watch the entire folder by only passing in the folder name instead of the entire file path. e.g. simple-css-hmr example.

Programmatically

To activate the server programmatically, maybe as a part of your webpack setup, do the following:

var startServer = require('simple-css-hmr/server/server').startServer;

startServer(options);

the options object has the following properties:

interface IOptions {
    /**
     * The port to run the simple-css-hmr server on
     */
    port: number;
    /**
     * Any files or folders to watch
     */
    files: string[];
    /**
     * If the server should actively push the new css content to the client
     * or if the client should fetch it themselves. The default client will dynamically
     * handle this without any additional configuration required.
     */
    push: boolean;
}