For work I have to manage styles and keep them consistent between two different sites. To accomplish this, I created a repository where I can use gulp/scss to export the CSS I need. Changing this is not an available option for me.
One of the sites is built using Jekyll. I have cloned the CSS directory and pointed the CSS to pull from that directory, no problem. When I make changes to the scss, the gulp task exports the CSS, but the changes are reflected when I am running the site. It detects the changes and says it regenerates the file, but the CSS simply doesn't get updated. If I stop the Jekyll process and re-run bundle exec jekyll serve - the css changes immediately show up.
Basically, I just want to know if there is a way to make sure these files get updated. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Related
Static Files in Odoo
I'm new to Odoo, and am working through developing a custom theme for a client. I've worked through the theme tutorial despite the many errors and omissions that exist in that documentation (going to make a pull request to update that after I'm done). My latest struggle is dealing with static files in Odoo, specifically images in the theme.
The Setup
Running Odoo 13.0.20200323 on Ubuntu 18.04 in VirtualBox managed by Vagrant and provisioned with Ansible
The Problem
Changes to image files in the static folder are not reflected on the website. This includes updating the theme in the website theme settings (the update function seems to update everything else). I've changed image names, image content, moved them into other folder, and have not been able to figure out how to have any changes updated on the website. I've restarted the server, doesn't change anything. Updated the theme as stated above, doesn't work. The only way I've been able to have any changes reflected on the front end is to completely destroy and rebuild the server.
Questions
What am I missing? Is there a function I'm not running to trigger Odoo to update what it serves from the static folder?
How does Odoo work with static files in general? On the fly updates to files in the static folder don't seem to have any changes on the front end. Are the files in the static folder copied somewhere else on install, and then served from that other location?
Understanding
I understand that having images and other files change in a folder called static, doesn't make much sense functionally, and that's not my intention for this. Since I'm in development I need to make changes to files, like SCSS, JS, and images, and have those updates reflected on the front end without having to destroy and rebuild the server every time. To be clear, changes to SCSS and JS files that I've registered in .xml files and bundled with various Odoo bundles update just fine when I make changes to them and then update the theme on the backend in the theme management view.
My desire is to understand how Odoo handles the files in the static folder in general, how to update those files properly, and how to manage them while developing and for release.
Answers
I've figured out an answer to the first part of the question as to what I'm doing wrong. It seems like a browser caching issue. When performing a hard reload, empty cache and hard reload, or visiting the site in an incognito window changes are reflected to imagery.
As far as I can tell Odoo is just serving files from the static folder directly. Please correct me if this is not the case.
Follow-up
Does anyone have a good solution for working with changes like this and dealing with browser caching issues?
Answer: I've set up a a couple gulp tasks that use gulp-rev (will replace with gulp-rev-all soon) rev-del and rev-rewrite to handle cache busting through appending hashes to the file names.
I'm going to try setting up Browser-sync in proxy mode to see how that deals with changes to files on reload. I'll report what I find!
Update: Browser-sync has worked well so far as expected. But was kind of useless until I figured out how to work out a fix for the problem below
Does anyone know of how to automate Odoo rebuilding SCSS, JS etc. bundles? So that on file change the theme can be updated and the results seen without having to manually update the theme on the backend to see the results?
Answer: The main task was figuring out how to get live HTML/XML updates working. Which meant building Odoo from the source, and not making any updates or changes to the theme on the backend or frontend from within the Odoo interface. Passing the option --dev xml to Odoo when starting it with odoo-bin allows for the XML code to be evaluated directly, and makes live updates possible. But this extremely helpful (almost necessary) functionality is broken when you make any updates to the them from within Odoo. I'll report on any work arounds to this, but for now as long as I don't touch the theme from within Odoo (update the theme or make edits to it with their editor) then it works great. Also I had to bypass bundling my CSS and JS with their bundler initially to get those updates working live, but may be able to go back and rebundle them now that the code is being evaluated directly.
⭐️Boilerplate and Tutorial Series ⭐️
I'm going to get my whole process for theme building dialed in and then I'll be sharing the boilerplate and build tools on GitHub and also writing and filming a tutorial series on it. Since the built in documentation on that front is straight up error filled, omits critical information and also
I'm using Mix (this applies to Elixir as well i guess) to manage my frontend assets. I have Mix configured to version files in production but not in dev. As such, when i update assets, i get updated app.js and app.css files in dev and app.{hash}.js and app.{hash}.css files in production.
What is your advice on how to leverage this with version control?
Put the files in version control? If so how do i manage the constant changes during development? Keep adding new hashed files? Do i leave app.js and app.css on the production server?
.gitignore the js and css files and run npm on the production server to compile the assets locally?
Some other solution?
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks in advance.
At my workplace we've .gitignore'd the css/js folders for almost a year for different projects with no issue just letting the server handle npm as part of it's build step.
And if you use yarn, it'll create a lock file which ensures you'll get the same exact js dependencies on production.
When using versioning just use the mix() helper on your script/css tags and it'll handle pointing to the correct file via the mix-manifest.json file in the public directory.
For example:
layout/app.blade.php has
<script src="{{ mix('js/app.js') }}"></script>
when you run npm mix creates the the public/mix-manifest.json file like so
{ "/js/app.js": "/js/app.{hash-example}.js" }
The only issue I've seen is with mix and using the mix() helper it appears to only work while npm watch is being run, which is something elixir handled fine before but mix is relatively new so it might get addressed, I myself haven't been annoyed enough to look into it since during development I always run npm run hot which does hot reloading on any js file changes. -- Edit: this appears to be fixed now
rewrite app.{hash}.js to app.js with nginx and add its to gitignore
I am trying to use jekyll locally to build my website. It is all set up, and I can build and serve and see results at localhost:4000. There are no errors.
The problem is that when I run "Jekyll serve" I can't save files. The save option is greyed out and "ctrl + s" wont work.
I can open and edit the files, can do "Save As" and do other things - basically anything except saving.
I can save files when I am not serving them.
From what I understand, Jekyll is intended to be used to allow saving while serving so we can see our changes as we go. The auto-regenerate function (now a default with serve) supports that use.
I suspect the problem relates to some sort of permissions-type rule stopping me from editing files that are in use.
But because I am self-taught newbie and am not a developer/programmer, I don't know if it is something to do with how I have set up jekyll, notepad++, permissions or something else entirely.
Here is my environment:
Windows 8.1 64-bit
Ruby v2.1.5p
Jekyll v2.5.1
wdm v0.1.0
RubyDevKit
Notepad++ (in admin mode)
Here is what I have tried:
Scaled back the listen gem from v2.10.0 to v2.7.11 (the earlier was listed as safe/tested on a jekyll on windows website)
Scaled back Jekyll from v2.5.3 to v2.5.1 (the earlier was listed as safe/tested on a jekyll on windows website)
Opened Notepad++ in admin mode instead of normal mode.
Tried executing jekyll serve --watch (in case watch enabled saving)
I have not tried re-installing ruby v2.1.3 (listed as safe/tested on a Jekyll on windows website) because Jekyll is otherwise working I don't want to try a re-install except as a last resort - as a newbie I found it a pain to install it on Windows in the first place.
Can anyone help me with this (probably simple) issue?
I thank you for any assistance in advance.
Okay. So I feel really stupid.
But instead of pretending this never happened, I had better post this answer in case anyone else has a blonde 'moment' (read: an entire day) like I did:
Firstly, you can't edit the _config.yml files while serving. You can edit the other files - html, markdown, etc - but not the config file.
Secondly, in Notepad++ you need to make an actual change to a document before the saving option will appear.
I was using the _config file as my 'test' document for regeneration. While I did open up other files to check when I first thought I had an issue, I THINK I may not have made any changes to them - so the option to save them was never activated. After that, I only looked at the config file after making changes.
So, I THINK I may have been able to save while serving all along.
However, if I am wrong and it wasn't my own stupidity (which I strongly doubt), the steps I took which fixed it were:
Those steps outlined in my question; and
A reinstall of Notepad++ (as kindly recommended by 'nerver nerver' who has since removed his/her comment after I said that did not work).
SORRY ... and excuse me while I go and crawl away and hide in shame ...
If the files you were editing at that time was only _config.yml then the expected behavior is that the saved changes are not reflected when the Jekyll server is running/watching.
This is because the server is started after reading the configuration settings in _config.yml, and then changes that happen to that special file after that are not monitored by Jekyll (this is current as of May 2015, in case this gets changed in the future). Currently this is by design. see this SO question as well
What that means is, you have been saving the file when Jekyll is running just fine, the changes just do not get updated. A way to check this is to make some changes, close the file, then open it again (if you want to be extra sure, open in another editor) and see if reflected changes show up.
Changes made to other files in Jekyll when the server is running will be reflected. For example, if I edit a typo in a blog post, edit CSS files or change some formatting, and save in any text editor, Jekyll will regenerate the file from scratch and you should be able to see the changes by refreshing the localhost:4000 page (or whereever your server is running at).
I'm not sure about running Jekyll on Windows, but on a Linux terminal, Jekyll actually notified the number of files that have changed (with a timestamp) and that it regenerated X number of files. Something like
<timestamp> 3 files have changed. Regenerated 3 files in 0.0536 sec..
Lastly, this is probably not your issue, but I thought I might add this here for future reference, do not edit the files inside the _site folder, as they are always deleted and regenerated whenever the server is started again. Editing those files by hand might save and display changes, but the changes will be lost (because they are, statically generated every time by Jekyll)
TL;DR You most probably have been saving your files! The changes in _config.yml are just not reflected once the server is running, and has to be restarted for the new configuration parameters to take effect.
I'm fighting for some time with docpad performance in local development. Have issue with live reload. Small change in some less file takes even 100sec to regenerate and reload the server. It looks like even though there was a change in one file, he regenerates everything. I've added those, as suggested on docpad page:
watchOptions:
preferredMethods: ['watchFile','watch']
catchupDelay: 0
regenerateDelay: 0
also disabled tag plugin for local dev, as he is pretty nasty with its constant tags regeneration.
I'm on docpad 6.63.8 with the following plugins: coffeescript, eco, gulp, highlightjs, less, livereload, lunr, marked, paged, partials, tags, text
I thought that I will simply get over it with gulp watch, but obviously watch is not enough, server needs to be reloaded anyway and I don't think it is possible to replace livereload plugin with gulp livereload or I'm just to stupid to do this
I'm using text plugin a lot, and maybe it slows down?
I wanted to overcome the issue by using gulp for watching and regeneration and manual restart of the server and docpad server but I noticed that docpad server is regenerating all the files, even though they were already regenerated and are in the out dir.
Any ideas?
Yep - I've seen this problem with livereload. I see it especially with dynamic pages. To be honest I think the best solution for the moment is to just remove livereload - remove it from the package.json file and delete the livereload node_modules directory. To my mind, livereload is only saving you from having to hit the reload button on the browser.
I've been trying to adopt Sass into my development workflow. I do primarily front-end development and as such, I am updating stylesheets quite frequently. After endless searching, I have yet to find the answer to what I feel should be a simple question.
I use both Coda and Textmate, so a solution for either would suffice. When developing locally, I open the terminal, get my .scss file watched, then go to town. I save my .scss file, it happily updates my .css file... and then I'm left with the slight annoyance of having to manually select the .css and publish it to the remote server. Its not the end of the world but having to pause my usual dev workflow to manually upload a file I'm not actively in is becoming a nuisance. In Coda, it doesn't detect when a file has been updated outside of Coda, so it isn't marked for publishing. Its driving me crazy. I just need a way to save the .scss file and have the .css file easily/automatically uploaded to the remote server. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
The typical way Sass is used is to design on your local computer while using Sass, and to only upload the CSS (and probably the Sass as well) to the server once you're finished. Another alternative would be to run sass --watch on the server so that it compiles the uploaded Sass files.
I have had a rake task that calls rsync for this kind of cases. That still needs to be run each time but because it uses rsync only the changed files are moved. Now, while reading this I got an idea that shouldn't there be 'rsync watch' somewhere and indeed there seems to be: http://code.google.com/p/lsyncd/
Here's an interesting approach I just read about, installing compass into a small local ruby env, inspired by python virtualenv:
http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2011/adding-compass/
YMMV (I haven't even tried this myself).
The Sublime SFTP/FTP Plugin can monitor and auto-upload the .css output file whenever it's updated by the SCSS compiler.
Map your project directory to your server
Check it's woking correctly by browsing remote
Right click on your .css output file, and choose 'Monitor File (Upload on External Save)'
Keep the file's tab open in Sublime to ensure it stays monitored/uploaded.
For extra points, have a look at Browsersync or LiveReload.