templier

README

Templiér

Templiér is a Go web frontend development environment for Templ

• Watches your .templ files and rebuilds them.
• Watches all non-template files, rebuilds and restarts the server.
• Automatically reloads your browser tabs when the server restarts.
• Runs golangci-lint if enabled.
• Reports all errors directly to all open browser tabs.
• Shuts your server down gracefully.
• Displays application server console logs in the terminal.

Quick Start

Install Templiér:

go install github.com/romshark/templier@latest 

Then copy-paste example-config.yml to your project source folder as templier.yml, edit to your needs and run:

templier --config ./templier.yml

How is Templiér different from templ's own watch mode?

As you may already know, templ supports live reload out of the box using templ generate --watch --proxy="http://localhost:8080" --cmd="go run .", which is great, but Templiér provides even better developer experience:

• 🥶 Templiér doesn't become unresponsive when the Go code fails to compile, instead it prints the compiler error output to the browser tab and keeps watching. Once you fixed the Go code, Templiér will reload and work as usual with no intervention. In contrast, templ's watcher needs to be restarted manually.
• 📁 Templiér watches all file changes recursively and recompiles the server. Editing an embedded .json file in your app? Updating go mod? Templiér will notice and rebuild.
• 🖥️ Templiér shows Go compiler and golangci-lint errors (if any) in the browser. Templ's watcher just prints errors to the stdout and continues to display the last valid state.
• ⚙️ Templiér provides more configuration options (TLS, debounce, etc.).

Other alternatives to templ's watcher also didn't fulfill my needs at the time of writing.

For now, Templiér doesn't implement templ watcher performance optimizations, such as:

templ generate --watch generates Go code that loads strings from a _templ.txt file on disk to reduce the number of times that Go code needs to be re-generated, and therefore reduces the number of time your app needs to be recompiled and restarted. - https://templ.guide/commands-and-tools/live-reload#built-in

I also found templ's watcher to be unreliable when watching *.go file changes. Changing sub-packages didn't trigger the cmd rerun.

How it works

Templiér acts as a file watcher, proxy server and process manager. Once Templiér is started, it begins watching files in the app.dir-src-root directory. On start and on file change, it automatically builds your application server executable saving it in the OS' temp directory (cleaned up latest before exiting) assuming that the main package is specified by the app.dir-cmd directory. Any custom Go compiler CLI arguments can be specified by app.go-flags. Once built, the application server executable is launched with app.flags CLI parameters and the working directory set to app.dir-work. When necessary, the application server process is shut down gracefully, rebuilt, linted and restarted.

Templiér hosts your application under the URL specified by templier-host and proxies all requests to the application server process that it launched injecting Templiér JavaScript that opens a websocket connection to Templiér from the browser tab to listen for events and reload or display necessary status information when necessary. In the CLI console logs, all Templiér logs are prefixed with 🤖, while application server logs are displayed without the prefix.

Documentation

Overview

templ: version: v0.2.707