How to build and watch without starting the app?

[merwaaan]

Is there a known way to rebuild the app when its source code changes without having the electron app start?

From what I tried:

• electron-vite starts the app and watches for changes
• electron-vite build and electron-vite preview build the app just once

Something like electron-vite build --watch would sound perfect but it's not supported by the CLI and hacking electron-vite to inject a --watch flag anyway does not seem to do anything.

Basically, I'm interested in having immediate feedback and short iterative builds when working, but I don't need to have the application starting because it uses some features that do no work well with hot reload anyway (eg web workers)

Thanks for your help!

[alex8088]

• Hot reloading can only be used during the development. https://electron-vite.org/guide/hot-reloading.html

Maybe --rendererOnly arg meet you

The --rendererOnly option is only used for dev command to skip the main process and preload scripts builds, and start dev server for renderer only. This option will greatly increase dev command speed.
https://electron-vite.org/guide/cli.html#options

[merwaaan]

Thanks @alex8088

I'm not interested in hot-reloading, actually i want to disable it explictly.

Ideally, I would just want the iterative builds to not start the app.