Make runserver watch for extra files

Using Django Getting Started
1

Hello,

I’d like to know if there is a way to make runserver restart when other files than the source code are modified? For instance, with gunicorn, I can use the --reload-extra-file=other_file.txt option in addition to --reload to make it restart when other_file.txt changes. I don’t see a similar option for runserver. Is there another way to do it?

I saw here that I can hook into the autoreload_started signal. I managed to adapt the proposed code to make it work but this signal doesn’t seem documented, so it may not be the best way to achieve this.

2

You may get some ideas from Efficient Reloading in Django’s Runserver With Watchman - Adam Johnson and the associated watchman docs.

3

Thanks for the link! However, according the the article it cannot work on Python 3.10 and watchman sounds like a pain to install on linux since apparently they don’t provide the RPM or deb any more. The package don’t see to be included in my distro and I don’t want to install this manually.