Local development workflow?

[jasonwebb]

Hi! I'd like to work on a feature that I could use on my CNC machine, so I forked the repo and tried to get it running locally for development. I ran npm install to get the packages, then gulp to run a build, and then opened up www\index.html. I see some console errors, which got me thinking that this must be more of a template than an actual endpoint.

When I run gulp package, I see that ./index.html.gz gets rebuilt, so I tried opening that in my browser. The familiar UI comes up, but appears to get stuck trying to make a connection to a real device:

Can you provide some insight about how I could get this running locally to do development? Do I maybe need to buy an ESP32 breakout board and push ./index.html.gz to it each time I want to test something? Or is there maybe a way I could set up a mock device or server locally to get the UI to load?

[jasonwebb]

I just found issue #91 in the Issues tab, and it sounds like maybe local development isn't supported. Is that accurate? I purchased an xPRO V5 from Spark Concepts which runs this firmware, and I'd really rather not use it as a testing rig, given the cost. Do I need to buy an ESP32 breakout board to push code to for testing?

[luc-github]

yes you can do with standard esp32 - it is what I did when I developed the basic grbl UI
May I know what feature you want to implement ?

[jasonwebb]

I was thinking about implementing arrow key jogging, but last night I realized that my CNC xPRO V5 also allows me to connect directly to the Grbl core so I can run other host software that already supports jogging like CNCjs or Candle. Problem solved! :D