How does Codegen work?

[osdiab]

Subject

Codegen

Description

The docs don't actually say anywhere how the codegen command works, just that you should refer to it for details (and there are none basically). So I was surprised that just having the codegen prepare script somehow instruments the NextJS server to actually watch for style changes and panda to regenerate code automatically. Very magical to not have to run panda --watch or anything. Would love for this to be clearer how it works.

[astahmer]

I don't think the prepare script helps with watching files, but there is some file watching in the postcss plugin which you are probably (?) using

it's done here

panda/packages/node/src/builder.ts

Line 93 in 0a11c59

const deps = this.checkConfigDeps(configPath, configDeps)

tl;dr is: postcss plugin uses the Builder which finds a list of file dependencies for the panda.config.ts (from what was imported, recursively) and then checks that any of those config dependencies has changed whenever the postcss plugin notifies the builder that something has changed

[osdiab]

nice - that makes more sense. @segunadebayo if info like this can be included in some advanced part of the docs that would be super helpful! i'm a fan of understanding how my tools work so when things get too "magic" i get wary.