@boybay7
So just to confirm, even though I have edited code in like modules or custom.css for the font colour, it won’t be replaced when I update with git pull?
To have a complete answer to this, a more basic approach.
You have two things going on in your MM environment.
One is the server side, that is represented by the node_helper.js files. It is kind of a back office, fetching, progressing and forwarding data so it can be displayed in the browser / on the mirror. It does e.g. call weather or calendar APIs and fetches the data.
The server side communicates with the client side, which is represented by the module.js and module.css files (among others).
These are (mostly) responsible for building the html and css code that you finally see in the browser.
The server side is refreshed whenever you restart the mirror (e.g. by pm2 restart mm, or by restarting the Raspberry pi…)
The client side is refreshed whenever you reload a browser page (also with pm2, or - on your laptop - just by reloading the browser page!)
Meaning, you can e.g. display your mirror on your laptop (by going to http://MIRRORIP:8080), change things in custom.css or in config.js and just reload the browser page on the laptop to test these changes out.
Note however, that when you just reload the browser there may be things running on the server side, that do not understand you changes made on the client side anymore, since the server side code has not been refreshed.
The best way of keeping your mirror running and properly updating after code changes is using pm2 and above command to restart.
All of this has nothing to do with git pull.
Git pull is a synchronisation with the code on the git server.
Git pull is used to get updates on the module code from the module creator. It is comparable to updating any program on your computer.
Of course you should restart the mirror after having done git pull.
Hope that helps to understand the environment. It’s surely not easy for beginners.
BTW: If you wonder why you need both of these parallel processes:
The magic word is asynchronity. Whenever you want to fetch data from an API, which your mirror does a lot of times, you have to wait for an answer (the api call is asynchronous, its not synchronous with the rest of the code anymore, it waits…)
If you implement this into the same code that would build up your page, you would end up in a mess.
So the trick is, you have another process that just sends messages (here: notifications) to your page building code. The page building code can then react to these messages by updating what is on the mirror. It does not have to sit and wait for an answer, it can just react to a message.
I could go on for ages here, it’s really a fascinating concept for someone who has only been slightly in programming in the past. This has thrown me into kind of a programming pit. You can see that from the size of my answer :-)