Support for autoreloading on django .HTML template changes

[pjrulez]

Description

Hey, so, I don't really know how exactly is this supposed to work, but I can see that reloading works when I update settings, or views, etc.

But for some reason, when I'm making changes to .html django templates, nothing happens.

If possible, please enable this as well or just let me know if there's something I'm missing.

I did just test with and without django_watchfiles and the runserver does it. I have to manually refresh the browser but the change is there, while with django_watchfiles it doesn't update unless I manually restart the server which I assume defeats the purpose.

Thanks!

[adamchainz]

That doesn't match my experience. Reloading after a template change works, and it also works when I combine my project Django-browser-reload to automatically refresh the browser.

Also Django-watchfiles doesn't do anything special for templates. They shouldn't need watching, since they are loaded fresh on every render in debug mode.

Please try again to guarantee that it's Django-watchfiles interfering here, and provide a minimal reproduction if possible.

[afarrow]

For what it's worth, I recently switched to django-watchfiles and I just noticed the same problem. I put some breakpoints in __init__.py and for Python files, I see they're directly in watched_files_set so they take this execution path. But for my templates, the template folders are in directory_globs so after finding a folder that contains the changed file, the code takes this path and calls if fnmatch('template.html', '**/*'):, which returns False.

Here's an example test case for WatchfilesReloader that is failing but I believe should be passing:

class WatchfilesReloaderTests(SimpleTestCase):
    # other tests omitted

    def test_file_filter_template_dir_matched(self):
        self.reloader.watch_dir(self.temp_path / "templates", "**/*")

        result = self.reloader.file_filter(
            Change.modified, str(self.temp_path / "templates" / "template.html")
        )

        assert result is True

    # other tests omitted

[mangelozzi]

I have the same problem, one arguabley is making the most changes in templates, never had the issue before, and first time I have installed watchfiles and the templates dont update, so I am sure it is due to the change in file watcher. For what its worth, the TEMPLATES settings also has a DIRS options, those would also need to be watched. Using Ubuntu, and Django 5.1.4

Heres a my scenario example:

(Pdb) self.directory_globs
defaultdict(<class 'set'>,
,
             #... others
             PosixPath('/home/michael/cube/src/dist/app/services/templates'): {'**/*'}})
```py
(Pdb) filename
'/home/michael/cube/src/distros/cfm/app/reviews/templates/reviews/4913'

And WatchfilesReloader.file_filter returns False. What I can see is it is due to the symlink in my case. Here distros/cfm is symlinked to dist. To the other people, are you using symlinks by any chance as well? Weirdly the original Django file watcher handles it.

For now I made this change:
If your django settings file was auto generated it prob has:

# settings.py (auto-generated by django-admin startproject)
from pathlib import Path

# BASE_DIR ends up pointing to the directory containing manage.py—
# i.e. your project’s “root”
BASE_DIR = Path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent

# file: src/django_watchfiles/__init__.py

from django.conf import settings  #<-- add this

...

    def file_filter(self, change: Change, filename: str) -> bool:
        path = Path(filename)
        if path in self.watched_files_set:
            return True
        for directory, globs in self.directory_globs.items():
            try:
                relative_path = path.relative_to(directory)
            except ValueError:
                pass
            else:
                relative_path_str = str(relative_path)
                for glob in globs:
                    if fnmatch(relative_path_str, glob):
                        return True
        if filename.startswith(settings.BASE_DIR) and filename.endswith('.html'):   #<-- Customize for your scenario
            return True
        return False

[afarrow]

To the other people, are you using symlinks by any chance as well?

Nope, no symlinks.

There are two proposed fixes for this issue (#92, #134), it's unfortunate they're still sitting open 6+ months later.

For anyone else who's running into this issue, I got tired of manually patching __init__.py so I wrote the following bash script to do it automatically:

#!/bin/bash

# Patches django-watchfiles to detect changes in templates. Assumes you're using
# uv as your package manager. To apply a different patch, update the PATCHED_HASH
# and PATCH variables below.

readonly UNPATCHED_HASH="0cc1625e7478a9009b8ffa37347f0619ee448400cb8e5f1bf783c981f5c7e944"
readonly PATCHED_HASH="42cbceaf0ff6f4064049ec3e1c6a73f83945d4f4381b5ee90a702efe92175d21"
# Generated using `diff -u original updated`
readonly PATCH="@@ -73,6 +73,8 @@
                 for glob in globs:
                     if fnmatch(relative_path_str, glob):
                         return True
+                    elif glob == '**/*' and fnmatch(relative_path_str, '*'):
+                        return True
         return False

     def watched_roots(self, watched_files: Iterable[Path]) -> frozenset[Path]:
"

# Check if uv is installed: https://stackoverflow.com/a/677212
if ! command -v uv >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo 'ERROR: uv is not installed.' >&2
  exit 1
fi

# Using uv, find the location of django_watchfiles/__init.py
watchfiles_init_path="$(uv pip show django-watchfiles | grep Location | sed 's/Location: //')/django_watchfiles/__init__.py"
if [ ! -f "$watchfiles_init_path" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: Unable to find 'django_watchfiles/__init__.py'. Thought it might be '$watchfiles_init_path'." >&2
  exit 1
fi

actual_hash=$(sha256sum "$watchfiles_init_path" | awk '{print $1}')

if [ "$actual_hash" == "$PATCHED_HASH" ]; then
  echo "Patch already applied."
elif [ "$actual_hash" == "$UNPATCHED_HASH" ]; then
  if echo "$PATCH" | patch --forward "$watchfiles_init_path"; then
    echo "Patch applied successfully."
  else
    echo "ERROR: Failed to apply patch." >&2
    exit 1
  fi
else
  echo "ERROR: Hashes did not match for '$watchfiles_init_path'."
  echo "Expected one of the following:"
  echo "    $UNPATCHED_HASH (unpatched hash)"
  echo "    $PATCHED_HASH (patched hash)"
  echo "Got:"
  echo "    $actual_hash"
  exit 1
fi

[afarrow]

v1.2.0 fixes this issue for me

[adamchainz]

Thanks for following up. I am glad the eventually-released fix works!