Hot Reloading

Spry has the ablity to hot reload recently changed Lua scripts, Aseprite files, LDtk files, and images. While Spry is running, you can update a file and the changes will be reflected without having to restart your program.

Hot reloading Lua scripts will not update any references or callbacks. For example, If you change a callback function in a class constructor, old instances will still hold onto the old function.

function Enemy:new()
  self.timer = interval(0.1, function()
    -- update this function and save the file.
    -- changes are reflected for new Enemy instances only.
  end)
end

Hot reloads are done by checking the modified time of each loaded file. By default, this is done every 1/10th of a second. To change this, set reload_interval to a different value in spry.conf:

function spry.conf(t)
  t.reload_interval = 0.5 -- reload every half second
end

You can even set the reload interval to 0 if you want to poll for changes as fast as possible, but it increases the chance that Spry is reading the file you want to write to, and it wastes disk usage.

To disable hot reloading, set hot_reload to false in spry.conf.

function spry.conf(t)
  t.hot_reload = false -- disable hot reloading
end

Hot reloading is not supported for web builds.