How can I do hot code reload when developing with Cowboy?

Question

I'm developing with Cowboy and erlang.mk and currently my flow is : 1. change code in vi, save, run make 2. close Cowboy, start Cowboy again (i'm running Cowboy in console mode for tracing/debugging purposes)

Is there a way to make Cowboy reload and restart itself automatically with as little lag as possible? I understand I could add Cowboy stop and start to my makefile but maybe there is a better/more responsive way?

I saw there is sync package from rustyio but it seems overly complicated to have to hook it into my app directly.

Answer 1

I use rebar all the time. In rebar.config, I have

 {deps,[
        {sync,         ".*", {git, "git://github.com/rustyio/sync", {tag,"master"}}},
 }

I use a .erlang file, typically placed in src/.erlang with the following two lines

 code:add_path("../deps/sync/ebin").
 sync:go().

Now, whenever I save a file, it is reloaded. I see no reason why this shouldn't work for Cowboy