🐛 BUG: wrangler pages dev --live-reload does not watch static assets

[malobre]

Which Cloudflare product(s) does this pertain to?

Wrangler core, Miniflare

What version(s) of the tool(s) are you using?

wrangler@3.41.0, miniflare@3.20240320.1

What version of Node are you using?

21.7.0

What operating system and version are you using?

Linux 6.8.1 (arch linux)

Describe the Bug

Observed behavior

Editing a file served by the pages dev server does not trigger a page reload.

Expected behavior

Page reload on file update.

Steps to reproduce

• create a file (in my case a simple index.html)
• start pages dev server wrangler pages dev --live-reload [directory]
• edit the file

misc

There are comments on the original PR adding the live reload feature mentioning that users are unable to get it to work: #220

Potentially related to #4124 ?

Please provide a link to a minimal reproduction

No response

Please provide any relevant error logs

No errors in browser console or wrangler logs

[malobre]

After a little investigation wrangler seems to only watch files in the functions dir,
e.g: with wrangler pages dev --live-reload dist:

• touch dist/my-page.html doesn't reload /my-page
• touch functions/my-page.ts does reload /my-page

[treeder]

That would explain this one too: #4824

[malobre]

Yes, this is surely related, if not a duplicate.

[CarmenPopoviciu]

Hi @malobre, thank you for reporting this issue.

You are indeed correct in saying that pages dev does not watch for static assets changes. It currently watches for:

• /functions directory
• _worker.js file/directory
• _routes.json

Triaging this issue and will discuss it as part of the pages dev improvements milestone

[Hades32]

this, combined with --live-reload reloading before some build processes finish, makes that feature barely usable

[serban-mihai]

Are there any updates on this?
It's a major blocker for smooth development in local environments.

[zugdev]

what I've done is run another server&builder, using wrangler only for cloudflare related functions, in my case I use esbuild

[serban-mihai]

what I've done is run another server&builder, using wrangler only for cloudflare related functions, in my case I use esbuild

I know there are endless combinations of services that could be applied to Pages in such a scenario, but if you could provide an example that would be much appreciated.

[Brennvo]

Anecdotally, this was particularly confusing to me because the documentation for --live-reload mentions HTML pages:

--live-reload
Auto reload HTML pages when change is detected

However, based off @CarmenPopoviciu's comment:

You are indeed correct in saying that pages dev does not watch for static assets changes. It currently watches for:

• /functions directory
• _worker.js file/directory
• _routes.json

This suggests HTML only reloads when these type of files change. Maybe this could also be cleared up in docs?