gulp-server-livereload

> Gulp plugin to run a local webserver with live reload using socket.io

Serve a folder over HTTP and watch it for changes, telling the browser to reload itself when a change happens.

• Uses socket.io - livereload mechanism works even if your browser does not support WebSockets (PhoneGap developers rejoice!).

• window.console capture - it can capture console output from the client-side and transmit it to the back-end for display. This is useful for when testing from Phonegap, etc.

• Supports CSS injection (no need to reload the whole page if just your CSS has changed).

• Proxy mode - proxy requests arriving at certain URLs to other servers.

• Comes with a command-line runnable.

Installation

$ npm install --save-dev gulp-server-livereload

Usage

The folder supplied to gulp.src() will be the root folder from which files will be served.

var gulp = require('gulp');
var server = require('gulp-server-livereload');

gulp.task('webserver', function() {
  gulp.src('app')
    .pipe(server({
      livereload: true,
      directoryListing: true,
      open: true
    }));
});

If you run gulp webserver your browser should automatically open up to https://localhost:8000 and show a directory listing of the app folder.

Command-line

Install the package globally:

$ npm install -g gulp-server-livereload

Then you can run the livereload command to serve files out of the current folder. Here are the available options:

$ livereload help

  Usage: livereload [options]

  Options:

    -h, --help        output usage information
    -V, --version     output the version number
    -n, --no-browser  do not open the localhost server in a browser
    -l, --log [type]  log level (default: info)
    -p, --port     the port to run on

Options

Note: not all of these options are currently available via the CLI executable

Livereload behaviour

By default when a file changes the livereload script in the browser does the following:

1. Checks to see whether the changed file is a CSS file
2. If it is a CSS file then it reloads the changed CSS files in the browser
3. Otherwise it reloads the whole page

To override the default behaviour define the following method in Javascript:

/**
 * This method gets called by the livereload script when the server notifies it
 * that something has changed.
 *
 * @param  {Object} file File which changed.
 */
window._onLiveReloadFileChanged = function(file) {
  // do whatever you want here, e.g. location.reload();
}

The file parameter has the following structure:

{
  "path": ...full path to file which changed...
  "name": ...file name (without path)...
  "ext": ...file extension name...
}

FAQ

Why can't I reach the server from the network?

Set 0.0.0.0 as the host option.

How can I set main.html to automatically load when I visit the URL?

Set the defaultFile to main.html:

gulp.task('webserver', function() {
  gulp.src('app')
    .pipe(server({
      defaultFile: 'main.html'
    }));
});

How can I use livereload if my HTML is already being served up by a node.js/other app?

You'll have to add some Javascript to dynamically load in the browser-side scripts. For example, if the gulp-server-livereload livereload port is set to 34322 then you would add:

(function() {
  var lrHost = location.protocol + '//' + location.hostname + ':34322';
  var s = document.createElement('script');
  s.async = true;
  s.setAttribute('src', lrHost + '/livereload.js');
  document.body.appendChild(s);
})();

To enable console logging capture add the following query paramter:

s.setAttribute('src', lrHost + '/livereload.js?extra=capture-console');

How can I pass a custom filter to livereload?

In the livereload object, set the enable to true and provide filter function in filter:

gulp.task('webserver', function() {
  gulp.src('app')
    .pipe(server({
      livereload: {
        enable: true,
        filter: function(filePath, cb) {
          cb( !(/node_modules/.test(filePath)) );
        }
      }
    }));
});

How can I use non-hash URLs for my single page app (i.e. HTML5 mode) with this plugin?

When you're building a single-page app with non-hash URLs (html5 mode) then you want the server to always serve up the same file for every URL. This is where the fallback option comes into play:

gulp.task('webserver', function() {
  gulp.src('app')
    .pipe(server({
      fallback: 'index.html'
    }));
});

You can control exactly how the fallback mode works using the fallbackLogic parameter. For example, if you wanted to handle PNG files separately and not have the fallback get returned for such requests:

gulp.task('webserver', function() {
  gulp.src('app')
    .pipe(server({
      fallback: 'index.html',
      fallbackLogic: function(req, res, fallbackFile) {
        if (req.url.match(/\.png$/i)) {
          res.statusCode = 404;
          res.end();
        } else {
          // default fallback config
          fs.createReadStream(fallbackFile).pipe(res);
        }
      },
    }));
});

How can I use this with CSS preprocessors such as LESS or SASS?

If you use a CSS preprocessor in gulp, you'll need to run its gulp task (typically with gulp-watch) together with the server, so that LESS/SASS files are compiled as you save.

You'll also want to configure livereload to ignore changes to the source files, and instead let it only handle changes to the compiled CSS (which will be refreshed inline).

var watch = require('gulp-watch');

gulp.task('watch', function () {
  watch('./styles/*.less', batch(function (events, done) {
    gulp.start('default', done);
  }));
});

gulp.task('webserver', ['watch'], function () {
  gulp.src('.')
    .pipe(server({
      livereload: {
        enable: true,
        filter: function (filename, cb) {
          cb(!/\.(sa|le)ss$|node_modules/.test(filename);
        }
      },
      directoryListing: true,
      open: true
    }));
});

Note: the livereload server automatically handles generated sourcemap files properly so don't worry about them.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.md