A minimal and scriptable way to refresh a webpage.
herl proxies requests to your website and injects a bit of javascript to
allow remote page refreshes. Because it is just an HTTP proxy it is compatible
with any backend language or framework.
Refreshes can be triggered with herl -n or by manually POSTing to herls
notification endpoint. Of course you probably want to automate this by
integrating with your editor or an external file-watcher (the example directory
uses entr for generic on-save reloading).
In the below demo, because the index.html file is changed, entr calls
herl -n which refreshes the browser, and go run . which restarts the
application. While the application is building herl retries calling the
origin server a few times until a connection can be established, so the browser
only sees one refresh.
- Start a proxy server with
herl -serve -origin https://example.com. - Open the default proxy server url (
http://127.0.0.1:3030) in the browser.
This will show the content ofexample.com. - Run
herl -notifyto refresh the page from the command line.
For all flags see: herl -help.
"Hot" or "live" reloading, as seen in modern frontend frameworks, can be
achieved by combining herl with, for example, entr. entr can be used
to execute a command when files change, see example/makefile for a working
example.
Using the Go toolchain: go install s14.nl/herl@latest
From the AUR as herl-bin, so e.g. yay -S herl-bin
The github releases page has downloads in the form of:
.deb, .rpm, and .apk packages, and plain binaries.
- templ live-reload,
the main inspiration for this project. Because it is built specifically for
use with templ, it is hard (if not impossible) to use on its own. Its scope
is also much bigger than that of
herl, it also includes the functionality ofentr, for example. - node-livereload, requires changing your code, or installing a browser extension.
- browser-sync, seemingly works in a similar way to
herl, but has a lot more features and complexity. Written in node js. entr reload-browser, doesn't seem to exist anymore, and worked by doing some x.org magic to refresh browser tabs, if I remember correctly.- aarol/reload, requires changing your code, and is mainly intended to be used as a Go middleware.