Bazel nodejs liveserver

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I've been going through the documentation at https://bazelbuild.github.io/rules_nodejs/ in order to put together a small web based application. I've got babel building the JS code, and http_server serving it, and ibazel watching it, and everything is working as expected: when I make a change, ibazel notices it and restarts the http_server rule.

The next thing I wanted to look at is getting autoreload in the browser so that the browser would automatically refresh when the change was compiled. My understanding is that this requires the http server to not be killed by ibazel, but instead to stay up and trigger a refresh via the ibazel_live_reload mechanism. I believe that http_server doesn't support this, but ts_devserver is explicitly mentioned in several places. However, ts_devserver doesn't seem to be maintained anymore (although I did find a devserver EXE in the npm package, there isn't a bazel rule that I saw to use it).

Is there a third party live development server that supports the ibazel reload mechanism - or am I missing something completely obvious?

1 Answers

Disclosure, I'm a core maintainer on rules_nodejs

As of rules_nodejs v3.0.0, ts_devserver has been renamed to concatjs_devserver to try and better namespace it (it has little to nothing really to do with Typescript). Its docs can be found here. Note though that the concatjs_devserver comes with some compatibility gotchas, all dependencies have to be in named AMD/UMD or goog.module format for example, and may be tricky to use unless following the rest of the google3 toolchain.

We've (as the maintainers of rules_nodejs) tried not to wrap an existing devserver and publish it as of yet for various reasons, but it's something that has come up in discussion. I'm currently investigating some options in this space.

I'm not aware of any published devservers that currently support the ibazel protocol, there is a wrap of browsersync in the Angular Components repo which you may find useful.

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