django-watchfiles

Use watchfiles in Django’s autoreloader.

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Requirements

Python 3.9 to 3.13 supported.

Django 4.2 to 5.1 supported.

Installation

1. Install with pip:

   python -m pip install django-watchfiles

2. Add django-watchfiles to your INSTALLED_APPS:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       ...,
       "django_watchfiles",
       ...,
   ]

That’s it! 😅

Django doesn’t provide an official API for alternative autoreloader classes. Therefore, django-watchfiles monkey-patches django.utils.autoreload to make its own reloader the only available class. You can tell it is installed as runserver will list WatchfilesReloader as in use:

$ ./manage.py runserver
Watching for file changes with WatchfilesReloader
...

Unlike Django’s built-in WatchmanReloader, there is no need for a fallback to StatReloader, since watchfiles implements its own internal fallback to using stat.