LiveReload.js

What is LiveReload?

LiveReload is a tool for web developers and designers. See livereload.com for more info.

LiveReload.js connects to a LiveReload server via web sockets and listens for incoming change notifications. When CSS or image file is modified, it is live-refreshed without reloading the page. When any other file is modified, the page is reloaded.

Using livereload.js

On your build script / development environment, you need to have a livereload server that notifies the client whenever a change is made.

• LiveReload 2.x GUI for Mac
• rack-livereload
• guard-livereload
• Your own server - refer to the livereload protocol

Once you have the server running, include the livereload.js file in any HTML file that you want to be live-updated.

<script src="http://localhost/livereload.js"></script>

You can download the file from dist/livereload.js in this repository. Or you can install via bower.

bower install --save-dev "git://github.com/zaius/livereload-js#master"

Most live-reload servers will also serve up their own copy of livereload.js. Be careful that you are requesting the right version.

Settings

You can set options in a global variable LiveReloadENV before including the script. E.g.

<script>
  window.LiveReloadENV = {
    host: '192.168.0.123',
    port: 31337
  };
</script>
<script src="http://localhost/livereload.js"></script>

This allows you to directly include the latest javascript from github.

<script src="https://github.com/zaius/livereload-js/raw/master/dist/livereload.js"></script>

Available settings

• mindelay - minimum delay before the websocket attempts a reconnect (default 1000)
• maxdelay - maximum delay before giving up on reconnecting (default 60000)
• host - hostname of the server hosting the livereload server. (default window.location.hostname)
• defer - whether to wait until the user switches back to the page before doing a full page reload. (default true)
• debug - whether to output status / debugging to console.log (default true)

Secure sockets

Most browsers frown upon connecting to a non-secure websocket when serving the page over a secure connection. This version of livereload.js attempts to connect via a secure websocket (wss) if the page is loaded over https. Unfortunately many livereload servers don't support this. If you're running into this problem, you will need to use a proxy in front of your livereload server. An example nginx config that forwards to a dev server on port 8000 and a livereload server on port 35729:

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name example.dev;

  ssl_certificate  /keys/example.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /keys/example.key;

  root /var/www/example.dev/public;

  location /livereload {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:35729;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
  }

  location @app {
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
  }

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html @app;
  }
}

Then you need to make sure that https livereloads connections will be sent via the existing https proxy. You can override the port using the settings object.

  <script type="text/javascript">
    window.LiveReloadENV = {
      port: window.location.port ? 35729 : 443
    };
  </script>

Communicating with livereload.js

It is possible to communicate with a running LiveReload script using DOM events:

• fire LiveReloadShutDown event on document to make LiveReload disconnect and go away
• listen for LiveReloadConnect event on document to learn when the connection is established
• listen for LiveReloadDisconnect event on document to learn when the connection is interrupted (or fails to be established)

LiveReload object is also exposed as window.LiveReload, with LiveReload.disconnect(), LiveReload.connect() and LiveReload.shutDown() being available. However I'm not yet sure if I want to keep this API, so consider it non-contractual (and email me if you have a use for it).

Features

• live CSS reloading
• full page reloading
• protocol, WebSocket communication
• CSS @import support
• live image reloading (IMG src, background-image and border-image properties, both inline and in stylesheets)
• live in-browser LESS.js reloading

Issues & Limitations

Live reloading of imported stylesheets has a 200ms lag. Modifying a CSS @import rule to reference a not-yet-cached file causes WebKit to lose all document styles, so we have to apply a workaround that causes a lag.

Our workaround is to add a temporary LINK element for the imported stylesheet we're trying to reload, wait 200ms to make sure WebKit loads the new file, then remove the LINK tag and recreate the @import rule. This prevents a flash of unstyled content. (We also wait 200 more milliseconds and recreate the @import rule again, in case those initial 200ms were not enough.)

Live image reloading is limited to IMG src, background-image and border-image styles. Any other places where images can be mentioned?

Live image reloading is limited to jpg, jpeg, gif and png extensions. Maybe need to add SVG there? Anything else?

Development

Requirements

• nodejs
• coffee-script
• ruby
• rake
• mocha

Building

rake build

output is in the dist folder.

Running tests

npm install
rake

License

livereload-js is available under the MIT license, see LICENSE file for details.