air-verse/air

Air is a live-reload tool for Go applications. The problem it solves is a tedious development loop: when you change your Go code, you normally have to stop the running program, recompile it, and restart it manually before you can see the effect. Air automates all of that, you run it once in your project folder, and whenever you save a file, it automatically rebuilds your program and restarts it in the background. You just run the "air" command in your project directory, and it watches for file changes. When it detects one, it runs your build command (typically "go build"), and if the build succeeds, it kills the old process and starts the new one. Configuration is done through a TOML file where you can customize which directories to watch, which to ignore, what build command to run, and how to pass arguments to the resulting binary. It also supports loading environment variables from .env files before each build, and it can run inside Docker containers. You would use this during Go development whenever you are iterating quickly on code and don't want to manually restart your server or application after every change. It is especially common when building web servers with frameworks like Gin. It is strictly a development tool and is not meant for production deployments. The tool is written in Go.