Automatically call asset:publish --bench="vendor/package" during development in Laravel 4

Question

I'm working on a an package and I really need to be able to fire the

php artisan asset:publish --bench="vendor/package"

command automatically during development.

It's very time consuming to write that command every time I do changes to my JavaScript or CSS files in my packages.

I've tried to call Artisan in my service provider

public function boot()
{       
    Artisan::call('asset:publish', array('--bench' => 'arni-gudjonsson/webber'));
    ...
}

i got

ErrorException: Runtime Notice: Non-static method Illuminate\Foundation\Artisan::call() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context

Is Artisan not designed to be called via the web? Does anybody have some advice?

Answer 1

You can use Guard for tasks like this. For example, here is a portion from my Guardfile to automatically publish assets from a package whenever they are changed:

guard :shell do
    watch(%r{^workbench/vendor/package/public/.+\..+$}) {
        `php artisan asset:publish --bench="vendor/package"`
    }
end

You can also have it automatically compile Sass, setup livereload, etc. Take a look at Jeffrey Way's screencast to get started.

Answer 2

You can achieve this using Grunt with a shell watch command, e.g:

$ npm install grunt-shell

In vendor/yourname/yourpackage/Gruntfile.js:

    shell: {                           
        assets: {                      
            options: {                 
                stdout: true
            },
            command: 'cd ../../..; php artisan asset:publish yourname/yourpackage'
        },
        views: {                      
            options: {                
                stdout: true
            },
            command: 'cd ../../..; php artisan view:publish yourname/yourpackage;'
        }
    },
    watch: {
        assets: {
            files: ['./public/**/*.js', './public/**/*.css'],
            tasks: ['shell:assets']
        },
        views: {
            files: ['./src/views/**/*.php', './src/views/**/*.md'],
            tasks: ['shell:views']                          
        }
    }

...

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-shell');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');

grunt.registerTask('default', ['watch']);

Then start the watch:

$ grunt watch

This can naturally work after other grunt commands such as less or uglify has compiled your assets into public, thus changing them and triggering the publish.