note

The author of Nikola liked this approach enough to integrate it into nikola core, so if you’re running a recent version you can just run nikola auto. I’m keeping the post up in case the approach is useful for others.

I’ve blogged about using python-livereload before. It’s a great little tool which

• given a tree of directories and files, watches them for changes, then takes some action when they happen
• serves up another directory of content to a browser, and pushes a little websocket notification to it when the content’s updated, so it can reload.

This is perfect for Nikola, the static blog and site generator that I use for this very site.

Normally, you

• update your content
• nikola build
• nikola serve
• check it out in your browser, going to http://localhost:8000 and, if you already have it up, hitting reload.

With livereload, you just:

• run livereload -b output
• write!

Your changes show up live in the browser.

How To

Install livereload

$ pip install livereload

If you’d installed it before, now is a good time to upgrade.

Create a Guardfile

Put a file like this in your top level nikola directory. (The same one you usually run nikola build from.)

#!/usr/bin/env python
from livereload.task import Task
from livereload.compiler import shell

for path in ['conf.py', 'files/', 'galleries/', 'plugins/', 'posts/', 'stories/', 'themes/']:
    Task.add(path, shell('nikola build'))

You may want to customize the list of files and directories here; these are the ones in my install that contain content I edit.

Run it

From the directory now containing the Guardfile,

$ livereload -b output

This will

• Pick an unused high port
• start a web server serving the contents of your output/ folder on said high port
• Open a new tab in your primary browser with that page loaded.

So navigate to the post you’re working on, start writing, and the browser will always have the latest version. This is also great for working on themes, plugins, or anything at all that nikola build can detect.