sass-brunch omits modified SCSS on live-reload

Question

On my Phoenix project, I found a peculiar behavior of sass-brunch .

Here are the short descriptions of my problem:

• It generates a correct app.css on the priv/static/css directory when the Phoenix server started in dev envrionment.
• When I modify one of SCSS files, the app.css gets generated but lacks only the lines from the modified SCSS file. It keeps the lines from the unmodified files.
• This problem occurs on Ubuntu 16.04, but not on macOS.

On the log file, I noticed an entry that may be related to this issue:

[debug] Duplicate channel join for topic "phoenix:live_reload" in Phoenix.LiveReloader.Socket. Closing existing channel for new join.

I don't see such a line on my Mac.

My environment:

• Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop
• Phoenix 1.2.5
• Node.js 8.9.1
• npm 5.5.1
• Brunch 2.10.7
• sass-brunch 2.10.4

My package.json :

{ "repository": {}, "license": "MIT", "scripts": { "deploy": "brunch build --production", "watch": "brunch watch --stdin" }, "dependencies": { "phoenix": "file:deps/phoenix", "phoenix_html": "file:deps/phoenix_html" }, "devDependencies": { "babel-brunch": "6.0.6", "brunch": "2.10.7", "clean-css-brunch": "2.10.0", "sass-brunch": "^2.10.4", "uglify-js-brunch": "2.1.1" } }

[UPDATE]

I found an interesting fact.

• When I edit SCSS files using vim, the app.css gets generated normally.
• When I edit them using atom , things do not go well.

Answer 1

I found a workaround to my problem.

Put these lines to the brunch-config.js :

watcher: { usePolling: true }

As the documentation of Brunch says, watcher gets slower but can be more reliable by setting true to this option.

The usePolling option is passed to chokidar , whose document says:

usePolling (default: false ). Whether to use fs.watchFile (backed by polling), or fs.watch. If polling leads to high CPU utilization, consider setting this to false . It is typically necessary to set this to true to successfully watch files over a network, and it may be necessary to successfully watch files in other non-standard situations.