Plugma is very chatty when it's running

[DigitalNaut]

I've noticed in the Network tab that the plugin is constantly polling the dev server for the same HTML file when it's running:

Here's a sample using a blank project from npm create plugma@latest:

I compared it with both the base plugin template that Figma creates and iGoodie's figma-plugin-react-vite , but neither of those has any constant background activity.

This doesn't happen in a build, so I'm not worried about it. I think this is related to web sockets being used to monitor file changes, but does anyone know what's really going on? Is this normal?

[gavinmcfarland]

Hi @DigitalNaut . This is expected when running in dev mode. Plugma makes two requests in this mode:

1. A WebSocket connection from the Vite app, used for hot reloading.
2. A server check from the plugin itself, which ensures the dev server is still running. If it isn’t, Plugma will show a message explaining why it’s not working.

If you don't need to use the dev server you can develop your plugin using npm run build -- -w.

Any questions, comments or thoughts, just let me know.

[DigitalNaut]

That's all I needed to know. Thank you!

Awesome setup, btw. Been enjoying it a lot.

[gavinmcfarland]

Thank you. I'm glad to hear you've been enjoying it. You might want to try V2 which I'm hoping to release soon. If you want to try it run npm run plugma@next. You might need to make some tweaks to your plugin which you should get warnings for. Any issues just let me know.

[gavinmcfarland]

Also just to note, the reason other toolkits don't have this with Vite is because they bundle the entire plugin UI each time a change is made. However Plugma only updates the necessary parts of the UI with WebSockets via Vite's dev server. The npm run build -- -w command runs more typically like other tools.

If it's annoying to see error messages in the console when the plugin isn't running, you can hush these by disabling network errors in Chrome's developer tools. Unfortunately there's no way for me to suppress them but this is normal in any Vite app.