BrowserSync Grunt configuration - Multi browswer Live Reload

How to configure BrowserSync's Live Reload feature with Grunt tasks :

BrowserSync is capable of live reloading and syncing the changes across all your test browsers. This will launch a mini web server by using your current working directory as the base, watch your files for changes & auto-inject those changes into all connected browsers.

See my earlier blog post for the pros/cons of BrowserSync over LiveReload.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to configure the BrowserSync with Grunt tasks "grunt-contrib-watch" and "grunt-browser-sync" in a basic web page setup. You can easily configure your bigger projects on you follow the following steps:

Setup Steps:

The link to github project is given at the end of this article.

1) Web App/Site setup :

I've a basic web site with the following files / directories in my working folder:

  index.html
  css/
      main.css
  js/
      app.js

BrowserSync vs LiveReload productivity boosters comparison

BrowserSync and LiveReload both are the cool tools that are aimed to improve the development workflow i.e., productivity of front-end development team. In summary, they both reload your browser automatically when you change some css or javascript or HTML - let's say any resource.

The main feature that we get from BrowserSync is : it has capacity of live reloading all your test browsers. It doesn't has constraint to one browser, meaning : it can reflect your code changes on every browser/device/emulator. The new devices/browsers can be added/tested with no additional configurations.

 

Pros and Cons of BrowserSync with LiveReload:

Pros :

• Works across multiple devices at the same time
• Works with all browsers and devices
• No configuration/plugin needed in each browser
• Synchronized actions across all browsers
• form input, page scroll, navigation all gets synchronized across the browsers
• Works with all browsers and devices

Con :

• Initial configuration might be a little tricky
• npm, grunt or gulp etc needs to be configured and the dependencies might give some problems to configure