Shell autoreload

[Kazy]

Hi,

Someone has added an auto-reloading functionality to the python REPL (http://benplesser.com/2013/01/10/beefing-up-the-python-shell-to-build-apps-faster-and-dryer/ thanks for his work) allowing an auto-reload of the import, and even to swap already existing objects.
I've already ported it to be used with Flask-Script (https://github.com/Kazy/flask-script), but I would like to know if you're interested to integrate it. It has been set to be activated by default, unless watchdog is not available.

[techniq]

That looks very interesting. Let me play around with it, but I think it would be a great addition (I know I get frustrated having to reload the shell a lot, especially when playing with my models using SQLAlchemy).

I noticed one of your commits disabled model reloading, and you pass None to model_globals in listen_for_changes(). Does the current state of your branch not support reloading on model changes, and if not, have you found the cause why it's not supported?

[Kazy]

It was needed with Django because it caches models, but with (Flask-)SQLAlchemy, since models are usual classes and get no special treatment (or at least none I'm aware of), it is reloaded the same way. I removed the argument, forgot to do it.

[kennethreitz]

👍

[techniq]

Some feedback

• Please remove the additional argh dependency. It's only being used for it's CommandError. Maybe raise InvalidCommand instead? Infact I'm not sure we should check for anything other then _request_ctx_stack.top.app.root_path. PROJECT_ROOT is a Django environment variable I believe, but not really common for Flask. I'm not sure watching the VIRTUAL_ENV is helpful either. Thoughts?
• How about calling the --no-auto-reload flag --no-reload to match the Server command? Be sure to update the various docs related to the command
• The line from watchdog.events import FileSystemEventHandler should be inside the try block so not to throw an ImportError for users without watchdog.

Go ahead and send a pull request so we can comment on specific lines of code easier as well. Thanks.

[Kazy]

I've committed those changes. About the first point, maybe we should add a way to specify a path, for more exotic configuration (like using a factory to create the app instance, I have no idea how Flask set the root_path variable).

[techniq]

@Kazy Now that Flask-SQLAlchemy has gone back into active development, could you take a look at this and see if its working (or report an issue on Flask-SQLAlchemy)?

[Kazy]

@techniq I should be able to do so in a little more than one week !

[techniq]

Awesome, thanks.

[sibelius]

The autoreload is not working yet?

[davidism]

@sibeliusseraphini it looks like they were trying to implement it in #52 but never finished.

[sibelius]

We can have a Flask autoreload on shell using ipython

Just create the app inside ipython

$ ipython
%autoreload 2
app = create_app()

[takosuke]

Bump this - I have autoreload enabled like @sibeliusseraphini in my ipython profile but it gets ignored when using the flask-script shell. Any way I'm not seeing of doing it?