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Version: 0.50.0

Everyday Heft commands

The Getting started with Heft tutorial introduced the heft build and heft test command-line actions. In this section, we'll call out a few everyday commands that are particularly useful to know about. Refer to the Heft command line reference for a full listing of actions and parameters.

Investigating problems​

If you're diagnosing problems with the Heft build, there are a couple useful parameters to be aware of:

  • --verbose: For example, instead of heft build, you can run heft build --verbose to see more details about how the tasks are invoked.
  • --debug: For even more detail, you can run heft --debug build to see call stacks and additional trace information. Note that --debug is a global parameter, so it must precede the build action name.

Building with --watch​

If you run heft build --watch, the TypeScript compiler will continue running and wait for changes to source files. Whenever a file is changed, Heft will rebuild only the affected files, as a minimal incremental update that can be very fast.

When using Webpack, heft start invokes a localhost dev server (see DevServer) that uses this mode to automatically reload the web browser with the recompiled code, every time a source file is saved. This can save a lot of time when tuning UI layouts! The --watch parameter is not needed with heft start, because watch mode is always enabled for that action.

Jest interactive shell​

For tests, you can also do heft test --watch which invokes Jest's interactive shell. It shows a menu like this:

No tests found related to files changed since last commit.
Press `a` to run all tests, or run Jest with `--watchAll`.

Run start. 0 test suites

Tests finished:
  Successes: 0
  Failures: 0
  Total: 0

Watch Usage
 › Press a to run all tests.
 › Press f to run only failed tests.
 › Press p to filter by a filename regex pattern.
 › Press t to filter by a test name regex pattern.
 › Press q to quit watch mode.
 › Press Enter to trigger a test run.

Whenever you save a change to a source file, Heft will automatically recompile the project, and then Jest will rerun any affected tests, updating the report.