Vogue

Vogue creates a real-time link between your web browser and your file system. When you save a CSS file, used by the HTML page in your browser, Vogue will make the browser reload the stylesheet. Only the stylesheet is reloaded, not the entire page, making it work even for very dynamic/ajax pages.

Vogue is all javascript. It runs a server on Node.js, which will watch the file system. The server accepts WebSocket connections from the client code (which uses socket.io). The client javascript can be loaded into a HTML page using a single script tag.

Install using npm

Make sure you have Node.JS and npm installed.
Then run:

npm install vogue -g

Usage

Run the Vogue server.

vogue --port 8001 /path/to/website

--port : The port used for Vogue's HTTP server. Optional, defaults to 8001.

--rewrite : A rule in the form of "regexp:replacement" (e.g. "v[0-9]/(.*)$:files/$1" ) to rewrite urls to filesystem paths. Submatches such as $1 will probably need to entered in your shell as $1 to escape the $.

Open http://localhost:8001/ to see instructions for loading the Vogue client into your web pages.

Demo

Vogue runs a separate HTTP server to the one running your website. To run the demo website, for example, do something like this first:

cd demo  
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Then, from another terminal session, run Vogue:

vogue demo

Open http://localhost:8000 (or whatever the port used by your web server is) to view the demo index page. The demo page has the Vogue client javascript already included. So it will connect to the Vogue server and be watching the two CSS files used by the page.

Try editing the CSS files in the demo/styles directory. Whenever you save, you will see the browser update the reflect the changes made. This is done without reloading the entire page.

Copyright © 2011 Andrew Davey ([email protected])