Trigger an extension reload from the CLI with keyboard input

[kumar303]

Is this a bug or feature request?

feature request

What is the current behavior?

When using web-ext run, the extension will be automatically reloaded when you edit the source.

What is the expected or desired behavior?

It would be nice to trigger a reload manually from the CLI. You can make a new blank line in one of your files and save it but that's a hacky workaround.

I found myself needing such a feature because I had erased some logs and I wanted to reload my background script to see the startup logging again. I don't know if people would need it much but it should be easy to implement. We could just listen for Enter or R or whatever key and do the reload.

[saintsebastian]

I would like to work on this, seems very useful

[kumar303]

Hi @saintsebastian , that's great. I was working on an extension today that could have benefited from this feature.

I think we could simply intercept the letter 'R' to trigger a reload. It could show a prompt like 'Press R to reload the extension' and it could maybe use this technique for reading the 'R' character (I haven't tried this though, maybe there is a library for it?).

[kumar303]

@saintsebastian hey! I just pushed this out in 1.9.0 https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext/releases/tag/1.9.0 Thanks again. Could you add a new section in the docs about it right under the Automatic extension reloading section?

[saintsebastian]

@kumar303 It is surprisingly hard to phrase for such a small function :) Feel free to fix my version.

[kumar303]

ah, yeah, that's a tough one. I made a minor edit to make it a bit more clear. Thanks.