Watch

Use the watch command to trigger a new build when your source files change.

In your package.json, add the Night Owl watch command to scripts.

{
  "scripts": {
    "watch": "night-owl --watch"
  }
}

You can now run the watch script from the command line.

npm run watch

Combining watch and serve

Usually, you will call watch and serve together.

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "night-owl --watch --serve"
  }
}

Watching other files

Night Owl watches all of the files that are located in your src directory.

If you need files outside of this directory to trigger a build, add them to the watch option in your Night Owl configuration. You can add file names or glob patterns to the watch array.

export default {
  watch: [
    // This file lives outside the `src` directory
    "../another-project/some-import.js",

    // This file is created by some other process
    "./dist/assets/compiled.js",
  ],
}

This can be useful for files that aren’t located in your src directory, or if you are building some files with a different process.

Note that watching a file will only trigger a new build if that file is a dependency of one of your templates. Otherwise, changing a watched file will trigger the server to reload the page.

Start-up

When you run the watch command, it will run build first.