A new Renoise tool for live reloading other tools during development.
Overview
This tool adds support for building tools outside of the Renoise Tools folder with full live reloading. You can use any text editor to make changes and when you tab back to Renoise the tool will be reloaded automatically.
Usage
This tool executes arbitrary shell commands! Consider using the Renoise script editor instead if you do not understand the risks.
Download the tool from the releases page and double click to install.
In the Renoise menu go to Tools > Live Reload.
Choose the directory containing your tool. This should be the directory containing the manifest.xml.
The Live Reload window will pop up.
The “Build command” is the shell command that builds your source code into a .xrnx (zip) file. Build commands are executed from the project root folder. The command is detected automatically using the following rules:
- If the project has a
Makefile, usemake - If the project has a
exclude.list, usezip -vr ${xrnx_file} * -x@../exclude.list - Otherwise, use
zip -vr ${xrnx_file} *
You can change the build command to anything but please be careful. It will be executed verbatim with no escaping after changing into the project’s directory. There are very minor sanity checks like ensuring you aren’t trying to zip the entire filesystem.
Press Build to force a build. If the xrnx file has changed the tool will be re-installed without prompting.
When Watch for changes is checked, tabbing back to the Renoise window from your editor will automatically rebuild the tool. Uncheck this when you are done developing!
You can close the window and builds will continue in the background. If Watch for changes is checked the next time the tool boots (which happens when any tool is reinstalled as well!) the window will be shown again so you don’t forget it’s running.
Tips & Caveats
Your tool folder must contain a manifest.xml with a valid Id set. The build command needs to create the file ${Id}.xrnx, e.g. for the manifest Id com.matta.livereload the build command should generate the file com.matta.livereload.xrnx. At the moment the generated file must be located alongside the manifest.xml in the same directory.
The tool works best when used with make. You can use this project’s own Makefile as a starting point. Make will not build a new .xrnx if the source files have not changed, which means the xrnx won’t be re-installed and the tool’s internal state wont be lost.
Installing a tool forces all tools to reload, including this one. If you aren’t sure why your tool is “resetting” that is probably why.
You won’t see an error popup if the build fails. Check the build log output instead.
Windows might work, but it might not. If it doesn’t the issue is almost certainly here. PRs are welcome.
I think leaving watch mode enabled while shutting down may prevent Renoise from exiting cleanly. I am seeing spurious crashes. Let me know if you run into this too.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome.
Please discuss new features before implementing them. I’d like to keep the scope of the tool relatively narrow.
Links
Source code: GitHub - matt-allan/renoise-livereload: Live reloading for Renoise tools
Releases: Releases · matt-allan/renoise-livereload · GitHub