After years of reminding myself to do it, I finally did it: gostatic now got hot reload! And it took me only two month (nothing compared to years of wait) to make a release and write this post.
I should say, it’s pretty nifty, seeing browser being updated almost immediately after pressing save (should I enable autosave in Emacs?). It’s not a so-called “Live Reload”, when a page is reloaded, that is a literal update-on-the-fly. Just look at it yourself:
That’s it, I gave you a reason to finally go and experiment with gostatic, if you never did. :)
So how does it work? A script is inserted before closing </head>, and this script establishes WebSocket connection. Then when some file changes server’s watching mechanism sends a command down this connection: page, if HTML changes, and css, if it’s the CSS. Simple and robust (I hope).
All in all just a really useful feature, and a pleasant to use and see. Enjoy. (I said that to myself)