ssg_reloader, a static site generation development server

I wanted to make something better than the plain python http server for pelican site development and then thought that actually it wouldn’t be too hard to build something which should work for all static site generators.

So i hacked together ssg_reloader, a simple python / flask app which serves files via http with a twist. All .html files get injected with a short ajax request, which queries the app if files have changed. If the answer is yes, browsers currently viewing the page get reloaded.

The web stuff is powered by Flask. HTML manipulation is done via beautifulsoup.

Flask really made the web side of the application extremly simple. The code for the ajax request is around about the same length as the entire view module:

from ssg_reloader import app
from flask import jsonify, redirect
from urllib import url2pathname
import os

from utils import inject_js

@app.route("/_ssg_reloader")
def ssg_reload():
    return jsonify(reload=app._watchdog.next())

@app.route("/", defaults={"path": "/"})
@app.route("/<path:path>")
def serve(path):
    if path.endswith("/"):
        path = path + "index.html"
    path = url2pathname(path)
    if path.startswith("/"):
        path=path[1:]
    if path.endswith("html"):
        file_path = os.path.join(app._static_folder, path)
        return inject_js(file_path)
    else:
        return app.send_static_file(path)
    return redirect("/", code=302)

You are welcome to give it a try, the code is available on github. There you can also find a bit more documentation about installation and usage.