Hot-Reloading Utilities for the WordPress Block Editor

This library aims to make hot-reloading Gutenberg editor blocks & plugins as simple as possible.

Auto-Loading Blocks

Assuming your blocks are stored in a folder organized like this:

src
├── blocks
│   ├── block-a
│   │   └── index.js
│   ├── block-b
│   │   └── index.js
│   └── block-c
│       └── index.js
└── blocks.js

and that your block files export at minimum either a settings object and name string:

export const name = 'myplugin/block-a';

export const settings = {
	title: 'Block A',

	description: 'An excellent example block',

	// icon, category, attributes, edit, save, etcetera
}

or a settings object that has a name string property (e.g., when using block.json to manage your block's metadata):

import metadata from './block.json';

export const settings = {
	...metadata

	// edit, save, other dynamic data
}

then you can put this code in blocks.js to automatically load and configure every block in your plugin:

/**
 * blocks.js:
 * Dynamically locate, load & register all Gutenberg blocks.
 */
import { autoloadBlocks } from 'block-editor-hmr';

// Load all block index files.
autoloadBlocks(
	{
		/**
		 * Return a project-specific require.context.
		 */
		getContext: () => require.context( './blocks', true, /index\.js$/ ),
	},
	( context, loadModules ) => {
		if ( module.hot ) {
			module.hot.accept( context.id, loadModules );
		}
	}
);

Block Editor Plugins

The same logic applies if you want to register block editor plugins: export a name and settings from each plugin module, then use the provided registerPlugin and unregisterPlugin methods within your plugins entrypoint file.

/**
 * plugins.js:
 * Dynamically locate, load & register all Gutenberg plugins.
 */
import { autoloadPlugins } from 'block-editor-hmr';

// Load all plugin index files.
autoloadPlugins(
	{
		/**
		 * Return a project-specific require.context.
		 */
		getContext: () => require.context( './plugins', true, /index\.js$/ ),
	},
	( context, loadModules ) => {
		if ( module.hot ) {
			module.hot.accept( context.id, loadModules );
		}
	}
);

Block Editor Formats

As with blocks and plugins, helpers are also available to register Block Formats.

/**
 * Dynamically locate, load & register all Gutenberg formats.
 */
import { autoloadFormats } from 'block-editor-hmr';

// Load all format index files.
autoloadFormats(
	{
		/**
		 * Return a project-specific require.context.
		 */
		getContext: () => require.context( './formats', true, /index\.js$/ ),
	},
	( context, loadModules ) => {
		if ( module.hot ) {
			module.hot.accept( context.id, loadModules );
		}
	}
);

Need More Control?

In case you need more control over things, the library also exports a generic autoload function, as well as any block- or plugin-specific function that is used as a default value.

import {
	autoload,

	registerBlock,
	unregisterBlock,
	beforeUpdateBlocks,
	afterUpdateBlocks,

	registerPlugin,
	unregisterPlugin,
} from 'block-editor-hmr';

This means you can either pass select custom values to autoloadBlocks and autoloadPlugins, or roll your own autoloader via a fully custom autoload.

Script Dependencies

For this to work, the bundle which utilizes these methods must be enqueued specifying wp-blocks, wp-plugins, wp-hooks, and wp-data as script dependencies.

How does it work?

The require.context Webpack documentation is available here.

require.context allows you to pass in a directory to search, a flag indicating whether subdirectories should be searched too, and a regular expression to match files against. The autoload method takes this context, uses it to load matching JS modules, then passes those modules through the register and unregister hooks as necessary. before and after hooks are provided to support things like maintaining block context, so that an update doesn't deselect the block you're working on.

It's possible this could be simplified further, but testing to date indicates that require.context and module.hot.accept must be called from the entrypoint file within your project, rather than being abstracted within the third-party NPM module.

A note on ESNext

Note that at present, this file is not transpiled and may break some build processes. A built file with wider browser compatibility is my next step for this project.