Okay so yesterday I decided to finally try out this hc serve thing everyone keeps mentioning for speeding up local development. Real talk, I kept putting it off because the docs looked, well, kinda dry. But hey, gotta try it myself, right? Figured I’d document the whole mess.
Step 1: Actually Installing the Dang Thing
First off, needed to get it on my machine. Pulled up my terminal, felt like a proper hacker for a second, and typed the install command. Took a deep breath, hit enter, and… nothing exploded. Good start! Got that green success message. Okay, step one done. Feels basic, but you gotta start somewhere.
Step 2: The Confusing Config File
Next up, config. Ugh. Opened the default config file it made. Felt like staring at alphabet soup mixed with symbols. Default port? Yeah, port 8080, that works. Directory to serve? Pointed it right at my messy project folder – /Users/me/code/messy-site. Screenshotted it just in case I screw it up twice. Saved the file, muttered “please work”.
Step 3: Crossing Fingers and Running It
Now for the moment of truth. Typed hc serve in the terminal where my project lives. Hit enter. Saw some text scroll by… it looked hopeful? One line stood out: Serving files from ‘messy-site’ on http://localhost:8080. Alright! Didn’t crash. That felt like a win.
Step 4: Clicking Like a Normal Person
Opened Chrome (of course), typed localhost:8080 into the bar. Held my breath… and boom! My stupid landing page actually showed up! Looked exactly like it does when I open the HTML file directly. Okay, cool, it works. But is it faster? F5 mashed like my keyboard owed me money. Whaaaaaat? Pages loaded noticeably quicker. Clicked a few links – zip zip zip. Felt smoother than opening files directly, less hiccups. Sold.
Step 5: Breaking It On Purpose (And Fixing It)
Being me, I had to poke it. Changed a CSS file and mashed save. Switched back to Chrome… boom, changes were there instantly? Didn’t even need a hard refresh. Just appeared. Okay, magic auto-reload. Nice! Then I broke it. Messed up the config file path on purpose to /bogus_folder. Ran hc serve again. Predictably, it yelled at me. Red text! Error: directory ‘/bogus_folder’ not found. Good! Means it checked properly. Fixed the path, restarted, back to business.
My Dumb Hardware Troubles
Thought I was done? Nah. Later that night, tried running it again while encoding a dumb cat video in the background – big mistake. The whole thing became super sluggish. Pages loaded… eventually. It was like wading through treacle. Hc serve itself kept complaining high resource usage detected. Yeah no kidding! Lesson painfully learned: my crusty old laptop ain’t magic. Closed the video encoder, everything zipped back up instantly. So yeah, don’t be an idiot like me. Works great when you’re not choking your machine.
So that’s the story. Ended up being genuinely useful for iterating fast. The setup was pretty painless once I stopped overthinking the config file. Main takeaway? Less waiting around reloading pages manually. Solid win.
