mod_development

Presents various tools for development.

Note

Do not enable this module on production systems, as it severely impacts performance.

Admin page

After the development module is enabled a menu item Development is added to the System menu in the admin.

On the development page it is possible to set debugging options, trace template compilation, and test dispatch rules.

Options

This can toggle various development options:

Show paths to included template files in generated templates

Checking this will add comments in the compiled templates. The comments will list the exact file included at that point.

Show defined blocks in generated templates

Checking this will add comments in the compiled templates. The comments will show the start and end of any template {% block %} ... {% endblock %}.

Download css and javascript files as separate files (ie. don’t combine them in one url).

Checking this will generate separate <link/> and <script/> tags for all files mentioned in a single {% lib %} tag. This makes debugging those files easier but makes loading pages slower as more requests will be done per page.

Enable API to recompile & build Zotonic

The api on /api/development/recompile can be accessed to trigger a full compilation and cache flush of Zotonic. This checkbox must be checked to enable this api.

Template debugging

The template selection mechanism is quite complicated. It takes into account all modules, their priority, the user-agent class (desktop, tablet, phone or text) and optionally the category of a resource.

With this debugging tool you can optionally select a category, and fill in the name of the template. Per user-agent class the selected template will be shown.

The second debug option is a page with a live display of all templates being compiled. With this it is possible to get greater insight in the template selection and compilation.

Dispatch rule debugging

With this it is possible to see for a request path which dispatch rules are matched and/or how it is rewritten.

Automatic recompilation

When this module is enabled, it runs a watcher program in the background, which watches files in Zotonic and its site for changes. If it detects changes, it performs certain actions. See below for platform-specific installation instructions.

• If an .erl file changes, it recompiles and reloads the file on-the-fly. When a module exports notifier functions (observe_... or pid_observe_... functions), these are re-registered with the notification system automatically.
• If a .scss or .less file is touched, it calls lessc to compile it to its .css equivalent.
• If a template file is added, or a dispatch rule changed, it flushes the cache so the template file or the dispatch rule is found.

Linux installation

On Linux this feature depends on the inotifywait tool, which is part of the inotify-tools package. For displaying notifications, it uses notify-send:

sudo apt-get install inotify-tools libnotify-bin

MacOS X installation

On MacOS X (version 10.8 and higher), we use the external programs fswatch and terminal-notifier:

sudo brew install fswatch
sudo brew install terminal-notifier

Configuration options

mod_development.libsep

Boolean value. If true, lib files will be included separately instead of in one big concatenated file.