Option to disable terminal clearing in dev mode

[alubbe]

Hi all,

we're working in a monorepo and we use yarn workspaces to have one command that launches several services, incl. snowpack. Unfortunately, snowpack in dev mode clears the terminal (on startup and whenever a file gets changed), which removes all the previous lines from the terminal, which are often really useful and interesting, since they came from other services. It would be great to have an option to tell snowpack in dev mode to just log additional lines, not remove/clear anything. Or does that already exist?

Thanks!

[FredKSchott]

That doesn't exist. Some dev tools use a "dashboard" approach to logging, which means we need to take over the entire console to live-update it like a dashboard. Running TypeScript in watch mode, for example, does this, so we need to be able to handle it.

Have you seen this plugin? https://www.npmjs.com/package/@snowpack/plugin-run-script If you run those scripts through your Snowpack config instead, snowpack dev could become your unified dev log console. That may help you here.

I'm +1 for offering a non-dashboard output style, similar to the snowpack build --watch output.

[alubbe]

I'm aware of https://www.npmjs.com/package/@snowpack/plugin-run-script, we use it for SCSS compilation.
We already have k8s and yarn workspaces to orchestrate our workflows, so I'd rather be able to tell snowpack to log differently and keep our setup, if possible.

I'm +1 for offering a non-dashboard output style, similar to the snowpack build --watch output.

That's a great idea, that type of logging would work great for us

[alubbe]

Sorry to follow-up in this. I realise it's a really unsexy feature, but I can't unleash snowpack unto our large dev team and our monorepo until there's some option like this because it'll just break their workflow too much. I hate asking open source projects for timelines, but do you have a rough idea of where this would show up on your priority list; or alternatively, what we'd need to do to whip up a PR to add this?

[FredKSchott]

No problem, I appreciate the ping! I hadn't meant to drop this. It's actually not too big of a lift, given the work we've already done in build for this. To get parity, you'd want to:

1. comment out these lines (in a final PR, we'd want to put this behind a conditional via config)
2. Now that paint() isn't handling events from the message bus, you'll need to add your own. add some logging for these events. Something like:

// Example: (see more in paint.ts)
messageBus.on('WORKER_MSG', ({id, msg}) => { logger.info(msg, {name: id}) });
// TODO: Also add handling for SERVER_START, SERVER_RESPONSE.

I think that's it! I'll create a issue now that we've triaged/prioritized, and if you're willing to take a quick look that would be much appreciated

[alubbe]

I was just about to start on this and then I saw that you added #1203 last week - thank you so much!