👪 👪 👪 Community maintained package 👪 👪 👪

The sails-hook-autoreload package is no longer maintained as an official Sails hook. Use at your own risk. If you are interested in continuing development on this hook, please contact @sgress454.
It is now maintained by sails lovers instead of the official sails team.

We are still actively maintaining Sails, and using it in all sorts of production-level apps. We’re just ending support for this hook.

Thanks for using Sails!

sails-hook-autoreload

Sails JS hook to autoreload controllers, models, services and locales when changed.

This hook is to help with situations where you are rapidly prototyping/tinkering with app code and don't want to have to keep quitting/restarting Sails to see your changes. It is not intended to be used in a production environment. It also may not work properly in conjunction with other Sails plugins, especially ones that operate on models or watch for file changes!

Sails 1.0

From sails 1.0, an error occur when the hook reload models. The following fix looks to make you able to use the hook. module.exports.models = { archiveModelIdentity: false }

Incompatible plugins

If your app uses a plugin that adds or modifies models, services, controllers or locales, sails-hook-autoreload is unlikely to work properly. Here's an incomplete list of such plugins:

sails-auto-admin, sails-auth, sails-auth-bugfix-zb, sails-auth-no-test, sails-hook-admin, sails-hook-confirmations, sails-magik-swagger, sails-passport-hook, sails-permissions, sails-permissions-sequelize, sails-swagger, sails-swagger-bk, sails-swagger-spec, sails-webpack, cision-sails-auth, cision-sails-permissions, nx-sails-swagger, vanuan-sails-swagger, and any package that depends on marlinspike.

Note: this is not a statement on the quality of the above packages. They’re simply incompatible with sails-hook-autoreload.

Can't I just use forever or nodemon or [insert daemon here] to do this?

Yes, yes, you absolutely can, and if stability during development is your #1 concern, you absolutely should. Nothing beats a cold reboot to get that oh-so-pristine app state. The advantages of this hook are (1) it's faster, (2) it won't run your bootstrap every time (see #1), and (3) it won't drop your sessions / socket connections if you're using in-memory adapters during development.

Installation

FOR SAILS v0.12.x: npm install [email protected]

FOR SAILS 1.0: npm install sails-hook-autoreload

Usage

requires at least sails >= 0.11

Just lift your app as normal, and when you add / change / remove a model, controller or service file, all controllers, models, and services will be reloaded without having to lower / relift the app. This includes all blueprint routes.

sails-hook-autoreload will, by default, use the migrate: alter strategy when reloading model files unless you explicitly set the overrideMigrateSetting config to false. This allows you to change models without losing your development data when you have migrate: drop set.

Configuration

By default, configuration lives in sails.config.autoreload. The configuration key (autoreload) can be changed by setting sails.config.hooks['sails-hook-autoreload'].configKey.

Example

// [your-sails-app]/config/autoreload.js
module.exports.autoreload = {
  active: true,
  usePolling: false,
  dirs: [
    "api/models",
    "api/controllers",
    "api/services",
    "config/locales"
  ],
  ignored: [
    // Ignore all files with .ts extension
    "**.ts"
  ]
};

That’s it!