If you use Webpacker, you do not need dedicated livereload, since the webpacker-dev-server does this for you.
If you use esbuild, see our guide for that
If you use Sprockets this might or might not still work.
Next time you have to do more than trivial CSS changes on a project, you probably want to have live CSS reloading, so every time you safe your css, the browser updates automatically. It's pretty easy to set up and will safe you a lot of time in the long run. It will also instantly reload changes to your html views.
Simply follow the instructions below, taken from blog.55minutes.com Show archive.org snapshot .
Install CSS live reload (only once per project)
-
Add this to your Gemfile in the
:developmentgroup:gem 'guard-livereload', :require => false gem 'rack-livereload' -
Run
bundle install. -
Add the middleware, by adding the following to your
config/environments/development.rb:config.middleware.insert_after(ActionDispatch::Static, Rack::LiveReload) -
Run
guard init livereload. -
Restart your server.
Use CSS live reload
Run guard -P livereload in a console, and keep it open. Now CSS changes should be instantly pushed to your browser.
Notes for Ruby 1.8.7 projects
I had some issues where newer versions of guard wouldn't see file changes in an Ruby 1.8.7 project. After some experiments the following versions of guard und guard-livereload worked for me:
gem 'guard', '=1.8.1'
gem 'guard-livereload', '=1.4.0', :require => false
Notes for Rails 2.3 projects
On Rails 2.3, you need to add the middleware like this:
# config/environments/development.rb
require 'rack-livereload'
config.middleware.use ::Rack::LiveReload
Issues
When you run into Listen error: unable to monitor directories for changes you may fix it by
increasing the amount of inotify watchers
Show archive.org snapshot
with
sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p
