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Development Guide

This guide covers development workflows for building Balda applications with hot reload support across different JavaScript runtimes.

Hot Reload Development​

Hot reload allows your server to automatically restart when you make changes to your code, significantly speeding up the development process.

Node.js​

For Node.js projects, you can use several tools for hot reloading:

tsx is a fast TypeScript execution environment with watch mode.

Installation:

npm install -D tsx

Usage:

tsx watch src/index.ts

Package.json script:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "tsx watch src/index.ts"
  }
}

Then run:

npm run dev

Using ts-node-dev​

ts-node-dev is another popular option with fast recompilation.

Installation:

npm install -D ts-node-dev

Usage:

ts-node-dev --respawn --transpile-only src/index.ts

Package.json script:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "ts-node-dev --respawn --transpile-only src/index.ts"
  }
}

Bun​

Bun has built-in watch mode support with excellent performance.

Usage:

bun run --watch src/index.ts

Package.json script:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "bun run --watch src/index.ts"
  }
}

Then run:

bun run dev

Deno​

Deno provides built-in watch mode with the --watch flag.

Usage:

deno run --allow-net --allow-read --watch src/index.ts

deno.json script:

{
  "tasks": {
    "dev": "deno run --allow-net --allow-read --watch src/index.ts"
  }
}

Then run:

deno task dev