Watch Mode

[dagadbm]

Description

Here is the use case:

You want to regenerate the openapi types when a file has changed (in this case the openapi.json file).

It would be interesting to have a sort of watch mode built-in which would check changes to the openapi json file (or however is the best way to do this).

For inspiration/extra examples other packages have done something similar like this: https://the-guild.dev/graphql/codegen/docs/getting-started/development-workflow#watch-mode.

[PhilippMolitor]

I run my setup via turbo, which executes a dev script for all my packages. My OpenAPI server runs in dev mode, so when my generated client package is in dev mode, i expect it to watch the URL of my OpenAPI server and re-generate on demand.
This feature would be extremely useful :)

[mrlubos]

Hey! How often do you find yourself having to re-generate the client without the feature? You could also implement this yourself and call the codegen on change, are you doing that? I'm struggling to understand the workflow that would require this feature. Yes, it's nice to have, but it doesn't feel critical. I'd understand it if you were doing many many iterations rapidly that would require a file update. What does your workflow look like?

[PhilippMolitor]

Especially when I am designing parts of my API, i need quick iterations of that schema. Together with turbo that works, but for it to work the watch feature has to be implemented.

[dagadbm]

well I ended up fixing this quite some time ago:

    "rest:generate": "openapi-ts --input ./path/to/openapi.json --output ./path/to/output/",
    "rest:generate:watch": "chokidar \"path/to/openapi.json\" -c \"npm run rest:generate\"",

[mrlubos]

Nice and clean! What does your workflow look like? Do you noticeably benefit from having the watch mode?

[PhilippMolitor]

I like this solution for what it does, but I prefer not to add my generated spec to the codebase, but instead use the live endpoint of my app providing that. Is there an alternative for chokidar that does the same for http endpoints?