Europython 2019 Talk - Rewriting the Django autoreloader

Over two years ago I set out to try and improve Django’s autoreloader implementation. My PR was merged and the feature released in Django 2.2, and I thought I should at least mention it on my blog.

The role of an autoreloader is conceptually pretty simple: When a developer changes a file your software should detect this and make those changes visible to the developer. Autoreloaders are pretty ubiquitious - most development tools and frameworks ship with one and for the most part they give a great speed boost while you are working.

A good autoreloader is also surprisingly hard to implement and suffers from a fairly unique set of problems. The implementation can differ signficantly between languages - some languages make auto-reloading easier to implement and some, like Python, make it harder.

I was waiting for my EuroPython talk on the subject to be uploaded to YouTube before I wrote anything about this. And now that it’s up I can be lazy and just embed it below rather than writing a whole post on the subject!