inotify_httpd

Serve files over HTTP; immediately refresh browsers when the files change on disk.

This is achieved using Linux's inotify system calls, JavaScript, WebSockets, and an HTML iframe.

This tool requires Python 3 (but can happily coexist with Python 2). Requires Linux (or a system with inotify system calls).

Usage

# Serve a single file on port 10000
# ( a WebSocket port is opened on 10001)
inotify_httpd /tmp/file.html

# Serve a directory on port 10000
inotify_httpd /tmp/www

Installation

# Ensure pip3 is install
sudo apt-get install python3-pip

# release version
pip3 install inotify_httpd

# latest development version
pip3 install git+https://github.com/talwrii/inotify_httpd#egg=inotify_http

Caveats

• Content is served by a JavaScript wrapper, so may not interact very well with tools like curl.

• The browser's URLs are not updated when following links, due to the iframe wrapper

• Only tested with Firefox.

• The actions that cause refresh could be a lot more targeted: changing an unrelated but watched file may result in a browser refresh.

• There are no automated tests of behaviour.

Alternatives and prior work

• Browsersync is a Node.Js framework that provides a similar utility. It provides a command line utility that has similar features: browser-sync --server --files '.'.
• There are many browser extensions that will periodically refresh a web-page. These refreshes may create visual artefacts (unless some form of "render caching" is used) and one must trade-off the polling rate against responsiveness.
• bcat is a utility that can feed bash pipe-line output into the browser and refresh. This can result in a large number of open tabs and does not interact well with multiple browser profiles. Nevertheless, while true; do inotifywait /tmp/file ; bcat /tmp/file; done may be a good alternative to this tool.
• This question on StackOverflow addresses a similar topic.
• LiveJs is an in-code / bookmarklet solution that works by continually polling with HEAD requests. This will dynamically apply CSSs.
• reload is an Node.js command-line program that supports a very similar mode of execution. This is achieved through filesystem polling by executing a script called supervisor. Depending on the poll rate this may result in delays or moderate resource usage.