Browsersync Documentation

Here you can find all the information you'll need to begin using Browsersync. We have extensive information covering command-line usage, the API, Grunt/Gulp integrations and all available options.

In this section:

Global Install

If you would like to run Browsersync from the command line in any directory, it can be installed globally with the following command.

$ npm install -g browser-sync

Local Install

This is the prefered way to use Browsersync - installing it locally to each project. This way the dependency can be added to your package.json file and everyone on your team.

$ npm install browser-sync --save-dev
WARNING - do not use sudo! If you're running Mac OSX and encounter problems when trying to install Browsersync - either globally or locally, it's almost always because you have problems with npm permissions. Checkout their docs for a guide on how to fix this once and for all - it only takes 2 minutes :)

Browsersync works by injecting an asynchronous script tag (<script async>...</script>) right after the <body> tag during initial request. In order for this to work properly the <body> tag must be present. Alternatively you can provide a custom rule for the snippet using snippetOptions

Having trouble installing Browsersync on Windows? The most common reason for npm to throw errors when compiling Browsersync is that some of the dependencies (e.g. node-gyp need Visual C++ runtime libraries.

The way to resolve this is to install Visual Studio. At the time of this writing (Feb 2015) the compilation works fine with Visual Studio 2013 Update 4. You can then tell npm which version of Visual Studio you are using by the following command:

npm install -g browser-sync --msvs_version=2013

After installation of Visual Studio npm should not throw errors any longer, but only issue warnings. As far as we can tell, they do not impact Browsersync.

Sometimes, depending on your network, your OS will report multiple external IP addresses. If this happens, currently Browsersync just picks the first one and hopes for the best.

You could use a tool like dev-ip to list all possible external URLs on your machine, and then provide the host option in your configuration

This site is open source on Github & we welcome corrections/improvements.

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