If you deal with HTML on a daily basis, you should really use a livereload software. What do theses tools do?
- watching a set of files,
- send notification to web browser to trigger page reload. To do so, an extension is used.
I use an implementation of livereload in Python. Install it with pip:
pip install livereload
It comes with livereload command that serve port 35729 and watch everything in current working directory:
romain:~/Documents/sites/blogs/romCodeCorner なに? livereload
Serving on 127.0.0.1:35729
[I 150214 21:50:02 handlers:99] Browser Connected: file:///Users/romain/Documents/sites/blogs/romCodeCorner/cqrs.htm
[I 150214 21:50:02 handlers:104] Watch current working directory
[I 150214 21:50:02 handlers:108] Start watching changes
[I 150214 21:50:03 handlers:49] File /Users/romain/Documents/sites/blogs/romCodeCorner/tools_should_help_our_creativity.md changed
Notice that on Windows, you should run it through python with the absolute path. For instance:
python C:\Python34\scripts\livereload
Then open a watched file in your browser and activate the extension. Modify a watched file and enjoy auto refresh.
There is more of course as you can read on PyPI page. You can trigger a command when a watched file is modified. I wrote following script to watch markdown files, transform them into HTML and reload the page.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from livereload import Server
# create a server
server = Server()
# run make everytime a markdown file is modified
server.watch('*.md', 'make')
# serve on livereload extension default listening port.
server.serve(port=35729)
It's neat.
I'm a huge fan of GNU make… The Makefile I use to compile markdown files is:
all: $(shell ls *.md | sed 's/\.md/.htm/')
%.htm: %.md
markdown_py -e utf-8 -f $@ $^
clean:
rm *.htm
Of course, I use Python implementation of markdown ;-)
