electron main process hot reload or live reload

Question

It's easy to make a hot reload for webpage in electron BrowserWindow, But what about the main process? every time I change some event handler code in the main process, I need to restart electron to make the code take effect, any method to solve this problem without restarting the electron process?

Untie

Answer 1

There is not. Electron's main process is node.js, which doesn't support reload modules from its cache out of the box. Unless node.js have support for it, Electron will inherit same behavior.

Private

OK, tnx, although the answer is not what I want. – Untie

Answer 2

Install the nodemon package and add this to your package.json

"scripts": {
   "start": "electron .",
   "watch": "nodemon --exec electron ."
}

Run your code in watch mode with npm run watch or yarn watch

Civilly

This certainly does the trick. It's a little quirky since the Electron window will be killed and reloaded. Fine for small projects. Alternatives may be desired for larger projects -- I am not enough of an expert to suggest details about alternatives. – Flyer

Answer 3

Nodejs 21.4.0 has watch and watch path in experimental state. While this might not help directly, you can pass node options to electron

https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#--watch

Kuehnel