vovk dev

TODO: Flags here

The vovk dev command runs Vovk Dev Watcher that watches for changes at controllers and updates the schema and the client accordingly when needed by making HTTP GET requests to the Next.js dev server. When a change is detected, the watcher sends a GET request to /api/*segment-name*/_schema_ to get the updated schema. If schema is changed the watcher updates the schema and the client.

How it works

1. vovk dev and next dev are run together with concurrently .
2. vovk dev watches for changes at /src/modules folder.
3. When a change is detected, the script checks if the file is a controller and if it belongs to a segment by making some simple RegExp checks.
4. If the file is a controller and belongs to a segment, the script sends a GET request to /api/*segment-name*/_schema_ to get the updated schema.
5. The script checks if the schema is changed and if so:
   • If list of controllers is changed (added, removed, renamed), or method definition (including validation) is changed, the script updates the schema by saving it to .vovk-schema folder as a .json file making it fast to serialize and import after.
   • If list of controllers is changed (added, removed, renamed), the script updates the client. The client imports the schema in order build the exported library properly. The client is generated at node_modules/.vovk-client folder and is re-exported by vovk-client package. The client is generated with string concatenation and doesn’t use any AST libraries making it lighning fast to generate (usually a couple of milliseconds).

Since Vovk Dev Watcher is expected to be run together with Next.js dev server, it can be run two ways, both of them involve concurrently :

1. Explicit way. This way might be pleasant for those who want to have less abstraction. The downside of this option is that you need to define the PORT variable explicitly:

PORT=3000 npx concurrently 'vovk dev' 'next dev' --kill-others

At this case next dev flags can be defined normally:

PORT=3000 npx concurrently 'vovk dev' 'next dev --experimental-https --turbo' --kill-others

2. Implicit way. At this case the port is assigned automatically and checks if a port (3000 by default) is already in use and attempts to find the next available one:

npx vovk dev --next-dev

In order to define additional flags to next dev you can pass them after --:

npx vovk dev --next-dev -- --experimental-https --turbo

Behind the scenes the implicit way runs concurrently API which means that both ways are almost identical.

Read more about HTTPS in development.

When vovk init is used, the dev script is added to the package.json file preserving the flags that the previous value had.

{
  "scripts": {
    // was
    // "dev": "next dev --experimental-https --turbo",
    // becomes
    "dev": "vovk dev --next-dev -- --experimental-https --turbo"
  }
}

Run and exit

--exit flag can be used to kill the process created by vovk dev after the schema and the client were generated. This is useful when you want to run the script once and don’t want to keep it running.

npx vovk dev --next-dev --exit

You can create a separate script in package.json for this purpose:

{
  "scripts": {
    // ...
    "dev-exit": "vovk dev --next-dev --exit",
    // or
    "dev-exit": "PORT=3000 concurrently 'vovk dev --exit' 'next dev' --kill-others"
  }
}