live reload when serving locally

[cs01]

running

pdoc --http :8001 PACKAGE 

serves the docs locally, but if any changes are made, the server needs to be manually killed and restarted, and the webpage needs to be reloaded.

The PyPI package livereload is built to watch files and reload the web client if a source file changes. This is common in other popular tools such as mkdocs and create-react-app. mkdocs implementation can be used as a guide: https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/blob/master/mkdocs/commands/serve.py.

[kernc]

While the web page needs to be refreshed manually, the server doesn't (shouldn't) require to be shut down and restarted as module reloading is in place.

pdoc/pdoc/__init__.py

Lines 169 to 175 in f5b4a54

	if inspect.ismodule(module):
	if module.__name__.startswith(__name__):
	# If this is pdoc itself, return without reloading.
	# Otherwise most `isinstance(..., pdoc.Doc)` calls won't
	# work correctly.
	return module
	return importlib.reload(module)

If there's a bug somewhere, the import_module() mechanism is being improved as we speak.

[cs01]

Ah I was editing docs for pdoc itself, hence the server wasn't reloading. Still the client-side reload is a nice feature. What do you think?

[kernc]

If something can be done in about three lines of WebSocket JS API and maybe twice that on the Python end without heavy extra dependencies, absolutely love to see it.