topic Re: App development - live reload in Dashboards & Visualizations

App development - live reload

himynamesdave — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 16:35:17 GMT

Calling all Splunk app devs!

Are you using any live reloading tools with the Splunk server? If so, which would you recommend?

I'm tired of having to restart the server each time to test code changes...

Re: App development - live reload

somesoni2 — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 21:41:08 GMT

If you're just changing the views, you don't need a restart. Relaunching the application should be sufficient.

Re: App development - live reload

Ayn — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 21:45:06 GMT

What kind of code changes are you doing restarts for? If it's just for reloading views etc you just need to reload the application like @somesoni2 says. You do this by either accessing the app's base URL, or by clicking on the app text/image in the upper left corner in the web interface.

Other stuff can often be reloaded by hitting the /debug/refresh endpoint in splunkweb, i.e. http://yourserver:8000/debug/refresh

Re: App development - live reload

sideview — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 22:00:16 GMT

If you have Sideview Utils installed already, bookmark its "Freshmaker" view.

Where it is in the app navigation menu depends on what version you have. If you have the most recent (3.0), it's at "Tools > Other Tools > The FreshMaker"

or you can just go to : /en-US/apps/sideview_utils/refresh_entities

Ayn is right of course that you can hit the debug/refresh URL http://yourserver:8000/debug/refresh and you can hit it for just one particular entity with URL's like http://yourserver:8000/en-US/debug/refresh?entity=/admin/views. However the core debug/refresh endpoint can get really slow. On my main windows dev server just hitting the views endpoint takes 22 seconds at the moment.

The Sideview Utils FreshMaker, as of version 3.0 implements its own little python controller so that you can refresh individual endpoint and the request only takes a fraction of a second.

And in more recent versions of Splunk you can indeed hit the app logo to refresh the views. However in my experience it's not 100% reliable and even that is too long for me to wait. My test-tweak iteration cycle drops down to seconds when I'm troubleshooting and a five second wait between page reloads doesn't work for me as an app developer.

Download Sideview Utils here - http://sideviewapps.com/apps/sideview-utils