koa-refresh

An easy way to live reload your middleware with Gulp

Mounting middleware

Require koa-refresh and pass it the name of your directory containing your middleware files.

var app = require('koa')();
var refresh = require('koa-refresh');

app.use(refresh('api'));

app.listen(5000);

The files in your middleware directory can be either generators you would pass into app.use or koa applications. If you export a koa application in file lol.js, it is mounted at /lol using koa-mount.

Refreshing with Gulp

Require the Gulp plugins:

var rebuild = require('koa-refresh/gulp').rebuild;
var start = require('koa-refresh/gulp').start;
var kill = require('koa-refresh/gulp').kill;

Start your server:

gulp.src('app.js')
	.pipe(start({
		flags: ['--harmony']
	}))
	.pipe(notify({
		message: 'Server Started!'
	}));

Start takes an options object with two properties: flags and args. flags is an array of your Node flags. args is an array of arguments to pass to your server.

Create a task to refresh after change:

return gulp.src('app.js')
	.pipe(rebuild())
	.pipe(notify({
		message: 'API endpoints rebuilt!'
	}));

Make sure your server exits when Gulp does:

process.on('exit', kill);

Example

Try out the example in /example. If you have Gulp globally installed, you can run gulp watch. Anytime you update a file in /example/api, Gulp will trigger a refresh.