Reload handling

Warning

All of the information on this page no longer applies for versions 6.2.0 and up. I discovered a supported way of dealing with reloads. (ServerLoadEvent) That being said, restarting your server is still the better option if possible.

IFS does not support server reloads and if you reload your server your shops will no longer work until you run /ifs reload. For those that really do want to use /reload, IFS does offer a workaround, which will be explained here.

The workaround

In the main configuration file you can find reloadHandling: true. This setting will enable a (hacky) workaround to load your shops on reload as expected. This seems to be working fine, but due to the way this is implemented it has the potential to fail.

Why not support reloads?

IFS loads your shops as soon as a world gets loaded. This means IFS can protect your shops before any player is able to join the server. Additionally, this gives IFS some time to calculate all available recipes and combinations of these recipes once at world load. The problem here is that if you reload your server, worlds stay loaded and do not reload. There is no (clean) way for IFS to know whether it was reloaded or started, as it's memory is wiped on reload by the server.

A completely seperate (and controversial) topic is that reloads are bad for your server anyway, and that they can cause issues. (see threads like: 1 2 3 ... )

Technical details

IFS hooks and detects the use of the /reload command. As soon as it is used, IFS will create a file in the plugin folder that it will look for when starting up, this works as a memory substitute. If the file is there, IFS knows that this is a reload, and not a "cold start". It will then be able to handle this appropriately by force loading your shops. The reason that this is hacky is that the file can go missing for any reason, or take a while to show up if your disk is slow. A file write could fail, ...