mini-sync

mini-sync is an incredibly tiny, live-reloading development server that uses server-sent events to keep your browser in sync with your front-end code.

Key features

• 🦗 For less than a few hundred KBs, get a fully functional static server that can communicate with browsers during development
• ♻️ Bundles the maintained version of livereload-js in the client code to manage the reloading logic
• 📦 Client code may be included in browsers via your preferred bundler, the static server or CDN

Table of contents

• Setup
• Usage
  • Server
  • Client
    • Load directly in your HTML
    • Conditionally add it to your bundle
• API
  • Table of Contents
  • CreateReturn
    • Properties
  • StartReturn
    • Properties
  • create
    • Parameters
    • Examples
  • reload
    • Parameters
  • close
  • start
• Possible future features
• License

Setup

mini-sync has two layers - the server code that's responsible for serving static assets and delivering reload requests, and the client code that needs to be present on your page to receive messages from the server.

Install the package with npm, yarn, or pnpm:

npm install --save-dev mini-sync
# or
yarn add --dev mini-sync
# or
pnpm add --save-dev mini-sync

Usage

You will need to integrate mini-sync both into your build pipeline and your JavaScript/HTML.

Server

Implement mini-sync in your build tool by using it as the static server for your assets during development. Once the server is created, it will return a reload function that can be called any time you need to communicate with the browser, a start function for activating the static server and watching for reload calls, and a close function for stopping the server.

const chokidar = require('chokidar'); // or your preferred file watcher
const { create } = require('mini-sync');

const dirToWatch = './app';

async function main() {
  const server = create({
    dir: dirToWatch,
    port: 3000,
  });

  const watcher = chokidar.watch('.', { cwd: dirToWatch });

  // every time a file changes, we call the reload command
  watcher.on('change', (path) => {
    server.reload(path);
  });

  // start our dev server
  const { local, network } = await server.start();

  // report out what our URLs are
  console.log(`Local server URL: ${local}`); // http://localhost:3000
  console.log(`Local network URL: ${network}`); // http://127.x.x.x:3000

  // ...some time later
  await server.close();
}

main().catch(console.error);

Client

mini-sync has a tiny script that needs to be added to your JavaScript bundles or loaded on your HTML page. How best to go about this will depend on your environment, but there are a few methods to consider.

Load directly in your HTML

If you just want to get the code in your page with minimal fuss, you can add it directly to your HTML. Ideally it would run before the rest of your JavaScript does.

As of 0.2.0 the mini-sync server hosts its own copy of the client script, and it can be referenced in your HTML.

<script async src="/__mini_sync__/client.js"></script>

It's also possible to load it via unpkg.com.

<script async src="https://unpkg.com/mini-sync"></script>

Conditionally add it to your bundle

Most bundlers support conditional includes based on the value of the NODE_ENV environment variable, or a similar mechanism. If you can do this in the configuration itself, that's great! But you also could include it directly in your JavaScript itself within an if statement.

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') {
  require('mini-sync/client');
}

In this case it will be present in development builds, but in production builds it will be skipped or entirely removed by your minifier.

API

Table of Contents

• CreateReturn
  • Properties
• StartReturn
  • Properties
• create
  • Parameters
  • Examples
• reload
  • Parameters
• close
• start

CreateReturn

What's returned when the create function is called.

Type: object

Properties

• close Function Stops the server if it is running
• reload Function When called this function will reload any connected HTML documents, can accept the path to a file to target for reload
• start Function When called the server will begin running

StartReturn

What's returned by the start function in a Promise.

Type: object

Properties

• local string The localhost URL for the static site
• network string The local networked URL for the static site
• port number The port the server ended up on

create

Creates a server on the preferred port and begins serving the provided directories locally.

Parameters

• options object (optional, default {})
  • options.dir (string | Array<string>)? The directory or list of directories to serve (optional, default process.cwd())
  • options.port number? The port to serve on (optional, default 3000)

Examples

const { create } = require('mini-sync');

const server = create({ dir: 'app', port: 3000 });

const { local } = await server.start();

console.log(`Now serving at: ${local}`);

// any time a file needs to change, use "reload"
server.reload('app.css');

// reloads the whole page
server.reload();

// close the server
await server.close();

Returns CreateReturn

reload

Tells all connected clients to reload.

Parameters

• file string? The file to reload

close

Returns a promise once the server closes.

Returns Promise<void>

start

Returns a promise once the server starts.

Returns Promise<StartReturn>

Possible future features

• Automatic injection of the client code into served HTML pages
• The ability to additionally proxy existing servers

License

MIT