Phoenix Asset Management - Watchers

I think that’s out-of-scope for the dev watchers config, per the docs

:watchers - a set of watchers to run alongside your server. It expects a list of tuples containing the executable and its arguments. Watchers are guaranteed to run in the application directory

Basically the :watchers option just says “hey also run these things”, but it doesn’t actually “watch” for changes and then run them.

So what you want to do is configure vite watch to also track *.heex file changes in lib/ (or the priv/static/assets/**.css or whatever is the actual change you want to get picked up).

I think the term might be a bit confusingly labelled but there probably also isn’t a better choice.

Could I explain my problem clearly?

My understanding is that @soup’s answer is correct. You have to ask Vite JS to watch the template files too.

Sorry, if this is looking down right simple and silly.

1. We did not add the template files to the watch task - when we were using webpack or tailwind-cli - still it was working. Any change between these two tools?
2. I tried specifying the template files as a glob lib/**/*.*ex - and - the live reload is taking close to 10 seconds or more to reload the page - with unpredictable results. Sometimes, the new styles are getting picked up and sometimes, only cached styles are working.
3. With tailwind standalone we were putting
   tailwind: {Tailwind, :install_and_run, [:default, ~w(--watch)]} in the config/dev.exs - that ~w(--watch) watches which folders? I guess, I need to specify something similar.

The default webpack generator would have been pre-configured with the right paths probably.

• I tried specifying the template files as a glob lib/**/*.*ex - and - the live reload is taking close to 10 seconds or more to reload the page - with unpredictable results. Sometimes, the new styles are getting picked up and sometimes, only cached styles are working.

Sometimes I see this with tailwind because the JIT used to write its results out in parts, you can configure the live reloader to wait an interval before it messages phoenix: GitHub - phoenixframework/phoenix_live_reload: Provides live-reload functionality for Phoenix · GitHub

• With tailwind standalone we were putting
  tailwind: {Tailwind, :install_and_run, [:default, ~w(--watch)]} in the config/dev.exs - that ~w(--watch) watches which folders? I guess, I need to specify something similar.

Tailwind will be using tailwind.conf.js’s content: key to know what to look for. I think it’s content, it used to be purge until 3.0. That file may not exist, tailwind might use a default one if it is missing.

Probably your best bet is to remove dev.ex and the live reloader from the equation first. Get your tailwind and vite builders and watchers working manually from the command line, in a way that doesn’t fight each other, then just copy the setup into dev.ex, and where ever you are also running them for prod builds.

My advice may not solve your problem. I don’t use tailwind’s utility classes in my templates directly; I always wrap them in my custom css file into synmatic classes using @apply. This way you would have a cleaner template file, also the watcher problem just disappears

Thanks for the detailed explanations @soup !
I think, I got a lot of new knowledge irrespective of what happens to my problem.
I was actually trying parcel-bundler/parcel-css: A CSS parser, transformer, and minifier written in Rust. (github.com) to process the CSS part of my Phoenix application.
I was looking for such an alternative because - tailwind standalone does not honor the postcss.config.js - and - it looks like the standalone is not supporting nested css.
To cut long things short - I am running parcel watch as a npm task - and - added the npm watch as a watcher in config/dev.exs - This setup is working well and fast when we start the server - however, parcel is not recompiling when I change the template files, even though tailwind.config.js is present and contains the content clause.
Yeah - looks like too many tools clashing with each other.
On a side note - probably, we need a nice CSS framework which does not depend on Javascript. Though tailwindcss is a CSS only framework without any JS - it relies so heavily on JS toolchain that, it is a big put-off.
May be there is an inherent dichotomy - Phoenix works great without node and the partnering tailwindcss is heavily reliant on JS toolchain.
Hope a better solution is around the horizon.

I fully agree. May be we do need a library with sane @apply statements - something similar to daisyUI — Tailwind CSS Components
But, the problem here is not the watcher on the assets folder. It is more on the Phoenix Lib folder.

If you have 100% synmatic classes in your template, you don’t need to watch the lib dir from the tailwind’s side. The lib and the cas would’ve been decoupled.

Beautiful. Did not think that way. I will try that. Unfortunately Reusing Styles - Tailwind CSS Tailwind authors do not believe in it.
Looks like for Phoenix LiveView Bulma: Free, open source, and modern CSS framework based on Flexbox is the best suited CSS framework. No JS, minimal tooling - modern - can be processed with DartSass.