xxshady / altv-esbuild

Hot reload (without reconnect and restart of the server) ✨

altv-esbuild

You can click for better quality

Special thanks ❤️ to innxz and uncle_ara for financially supporting me and this library.

A plugin that greatly simplifies server/client JS and TS development (as well as production) on the alt:V platform.
(extended and improved version of the previous esbuild dev plugin).

Features

• Write your scripts in JS/TS with enabled 5-million-polygon cars and mlo without client crashes
• Hot reload without server restart or client reconnect (using alt:V resource restart)
• Full client and server support
• Restart console command for client and server ("res" by default)
• Improved top-level exception output during development
• Direct support for alt:V enums, even in JS code (documentation)

Docs

Docs web page: https://xxshady.github.io/altv-esbuild.

How to use?

Example resource can be found here.

Install from npm

npm i altv-esbuild

Add to your build code of the server and client

Example of the build server code:

import esbuild from "esbuild"
import { altvEsbuild } from "altv-esbuild"

// your own variable
const DEV_MODE = true

esbuild.build({
  entryPoints: ["src/main.js"],
  outfile: "dist/bundle.js",
  bundle: true,
  watch: DEV_MODE, // this build option is outdated, see example directory in the repo
  target: "esnext",
  format: "esm",
  
  plugins: [
    altvEsbuild({
      mode: "server", // use "server" for server code, and "client" for client code

      // see docs for more info about these options:
      dev: {
        enabled: DEV_MODE,

        // if `DEV_MODE` is false it will also be automatically set to false too
        enhancedRestartCommand: true, 
      },
      altvEnums: true,
    }),
  ],
  
  external: [
    // none of the following is required, the plugin handles all alt:V modules automatically
    // "alt-server",
    // "alt-client",
    // "alt-shared",
    // "natives"
  ]
})

Limitations

Imports of types, interfaces

esbuild doesn't support importing types as values, you should use type-only imports import type or import { type YourType } syntax.
typescript-eslint with consistent-type-imports rule helps a lot with this.

types.ts

export type SomeType = number

script.ts

import { type SomeType } from './types.ts'

alt:V

Connection queue is not supported between hot reloads (or just resource restarts).
Player disconnect is also not supported between hot reloads. Only player connect is emulated for now in dev environment.

esbuild

Not supported build options

• Wild-card * external (for example: "node_modules/*")
• packages

How to find exact source location of any exception?

You can use esbuild source-maps like this: sourcemap: "inline".

serverside

Enable source-maps in server.toml and here you go.

clientside

Here its a bit complicated. If you use vscode Source maps navigator extension can help you jump to your source code.

Some libraries don't work with bundling

If you see such errors it may mean this is your case:

• Error: Dynamic require of "crypto" is not supported
• SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
• ReferenceError: __dirname is not defined

Libraries that must be external: discord.js, Prisma, TypeORM

✅ Solution: add this library to external build option of esbuild

Contributions

All contributions are greatly appreciated. If there are any questions or you would like to discuss a feature, you can always open issue.