Hard reset doesn't work

[ghost]

Hi there,

first thanks for that helpfull plugin!

A reload for the frontend-part (means changing /app/index.htm) works well. But if I define the electron-parameter the program crashes when I do make changes on the /main.js. Do you have any clue where does it come from?

Thanks in advance!

Two little fixed for your README:

1. The line
   mainWindow.loadUrl(file://${__dirname}/index.html);
   -> The name of the function has changed loadUrl to loadURL (capital letters)
2. And the line
   electron: require('electron-prebuilt')
   doesn't work anymore, because electron-prebuilt doesn't exist anymore.

[yan-foto]

It seems that you are using windows if I'm right. In that case I'm afraid that I can be of no help as I only have access to *nix machines. It might be something with the way node manages spawning processes on windows. But that's just a wild guess. And I don't seem to get any useful information from the screenshot. It might be better if you could ask this on stackoverflow.

Thanks for the heads up on README corrections 👍

[yan-foto]

On second glance: do you have electron installed in your project? i.e. npm i electron so that path.join(__dirname, 'node_modules', '.bin', 'electron') exists?

[ghost]

Hey, thanks for quick reply! Awesome! Yes, the file exists. I found out that the problem doesn't appear when i call
./node_modules/.bin/electron main.js
directly. But when I do it then just nothing happens, when I change the main.js (when I change e.g. the app/index.html there is a reload on the view).
I also tried out with and without the following parameter
hardResetMethod: 'exit'
Do you have a clue how to debug it?
If not, I can live with it :) Thanks again for your help!

[yan-foto]

I'd suggest that you try to spawn electron from inside a node process and see what happens.

[jaheraho]

Hi there, thanks again for the quick replying!
(its me again, using my first account)

I checked the command and it doesn't work - so its a problem with electron or spawn. I opened a issue on electron
electron/electron#8514

Another thought:
As i wrote in the ticket, when im writing the following it works (just annoying windows)
require('electron-reload')(__dirname
, {
electron: path.join(__dirname, 'node_modules', '.bin', 'electron.cmd')
}
}
So actually maybe I just need a command to start the app from my Phpstorm. (You need to know: I'm starting my electron via PhpStorm). So maybe putting '.cmd' is the solution for the "general" problem and I just need to find a way to restart the application from Phpstorm. With putting .cmd in the end it works but the following happens: Phpstorm starts electron, i change something in main.js, electron-reload quits internal Phpstorm-electron process and a new (external) command is opened. To sum it up: putting .cmd in the end is probably the solution. Its too late for me to say if I'm right or totally wrong now :)

[yan-foto]

Good job! I will update the README so windows users doesn't get confused 👍

P.S.
Unfortunately I cannot help with PhpStorm, yet another thing, that I have no experience with!

[bkniffler]

This actually is an issue. Adding .cmd helped, though it will open a new external terminal window every time you change something and the previous terminal window will not automatically close. Can this be opened again?

[yan-foto]

The question remains: is this an electron related issue or is it something that should be taken care here. I, unfortunately, don't have a windows computer to be able to localize the problem and draft a possible solution. @bkniffler could you elaborate on the behavior and suggest some possible solutions?

[bkniffler]

I guess it must have something to do with spawn on windows. Maybe something like https://www.npmjs.com/package/cross-spawn could help.

I've found another solution that works ok (slower than electron-reload) which is nodemon: nodemon --watch * --exec "electron .".

[TomasHubelbauer]

Could the Electron not found error text also be extended to include the hint now included in the README?

Like most devs, I don't read readmes further than to the first line of example code and while I should know better, I feel like it would improve the DX to say something like Electron not found. No hard resets for you. Are you on Windows? Check out https://github.com/yan-foto/electron-reload#usage.

[yan-foto]

@TomasHubelbauer it could, but I don't want it to... the whole console.log stuff were meant to be temporary. In the next release I want to have a proper event based system with well-defined error codes. So if you wait a little bit, we'll have a better solution.

[Sti2nd]

It seems this is intentional from Node electron/electron#8514 so it would be great if this was worked around.