Adding a watcher directory?

1

When using the zola serve, I get the message

$ zola serve
...

Listening for changes in /some/path/{config.toml,content,sass,static,templates}

Is it possible to add to to the list of files/directories being watched? I’m using load_data to bring in data from another directory that isn’t in the list, so auto-reload doesn’t happen when altering those files. It would be super useful to have an command line argument to specify additional files.

Am I missing something?

2

It’s not possible to watch other folders

3

Would you be open to a PR that allows it via a command line switch?

4

It would be great if the Zola dev server could watch files loaded via load_data. In my sites I almost never put anything to the .md files, all content lives in YAML data structures.

5

This has been fixed Add optional arg to `serve` for extra paths to watch for changes by rparrett · Pull Request #2745 · getzola/zola · GitHub

❯ ~/src/zola/target/debug/zola serve --extra-watch-path data                        
Building site...
Checking all internal links with anchors.
> Successfully checked 0 internal link(s) with anchors.
-> Creating 24 pages (0 orphan) and 11 sections
Done in 216ms.

Web server is available at http://127.0.0.1:1111/ (bound to 127.0.0.1:1111)

Listening for changes in /home/yashi/work/spacecubics/www/{config.toml,content,sass,static,templates,data}
Press Ctrl+C to stop

Change detected @ 2025-08-07 05:50:43
-> /home/yashi/work/spacecubics/www/data/foo.yaml changed. Recreating whole site.
Checking all internal links with anchors.
> Successfully checked 0 internal link(s) with anchors.
-> Creating 24 pages (0 orphan) and 11 sections
Done in 198ms.