How do I make Firefox auto-refresh on file change?

Html Problem Overview

Does anyone know of an extension for Firefox, or a script or some other mechanism, that can monitor one or more local files. Firefox would auto-refresh or otherwise update its canvas when it detected a change (of timestamp) in the files(s).

For editing CSS, it would be ideal if just the CSS could be reloaded, rather than a full HTML re-render.

Effectively it would enable similar behaviour to Firebug with its dynamic HTML/CSS editing, only through external files.

Html Solutions

Solution 1 - Html

Live.js

From the website:

> How? Just include Live.js and it will monitor the current page including local CSS and Javascript by sending consecutive HEAD requests to the server. Changes to CSS will be applied dynamically and HTML or Javascript changes will reload the page. Try it!

> Where? Live.js works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE6+ until proven otherwise. Live.js is independent of the development framework or language you use, whether it be Ruby, Handcraft, Python, Django, NET, Java, Php, Drupal, Joomla or what-have-you.

It has the huge benefit of working with IETester, dynamically refreshing each open IE tab.

Try it out by adding the following to your <head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://livejs.com/live.js"></script>

Solution 2 - Html

Have a look at FileWatcher extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/filewatcher/

it's a WebExtension, so it works with the latest Firefox
it has a native app (to be installed locally) that monitors watched files for changes using native OS calls (no polling!) and notifies the WebExtension to let it reload the web page
reload is driven by rules: a rule contains the page URL (with regular expression support) and its included/excluded local source files
open source: https://github.com/coolsoft-ita/filewatcher

DISCLAIMER: I'm the author of the extension ;)

Solution 3 - Html

I would recommend livejs

But it has following Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:

Easy setup
Works seamlessly on different browsers (Live.js works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE6+)
Don't add irritating interval for refreshing browser specially when you want to debug along with designing
Only refreshing when you save change ctrl + S
Directly saves CSS etc from firebug I have not used that feature but read on their site http://livejs.com/ that they support it too!!!

Disadvantages:

It will not work on file protocol file:///C:/Users/Admin/Desktop/livejs/live.html
You need to have server to run it like http://localhost
You have to remove it while deploying on staging/production
Doesn't serves CDN I have tried cheating & applying direct link http://livejs.com/live.js but it will not work you have to download and keep on local to work.

Solution 4 - Html

Xrefresh with firebug.

Solution 5 - Html

Firefox has an extension called mozRepl.

Emacs can plug into this, with moz-reload-on-save-mode.

when it's set up, saving the file forces a refresh of the browser window.

Solution 6 - Html

You could just place a javascript interval on your page, have it query a local script which checks the last date modified of the css file, and refreshes it if it changed.

jQuery Example:

var modTime = 0;
setInterval(function(){
  $.post("isModified.php", {"file":"main.css", "time":modTime}, function(rst) {
    if (rst.time != modTime) {
      modTime = rst.time;
      // reload style tag
      $("head link[rel='stylesheet']:eq(0)").remove();
      $("head").prepend($(document.createElement("link")).attr({
          "rel":"stylesheet",
          "href":"http://sstatic.net/mso/all.css?v=4372"
        })
      );
    }
  });
}, 5000);

Solution 7 - Html

There are some IDE's that contain this ability (They'll have a pane within them or some other means to auto-refresh a page on save).

If you want to do this yourself a quick hack is to set the meta refresh on the page to a low value - one or two seconds.

# Will refresh the page content every second
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1" />

Solution 8 - Html

Browsersync can do this from the server side / outside of the browser.

This can achieve more repeatable results / things that don't require so much clicking.

This will serve a page and refresh on change

cd static_content
browser-sync start --server --files .

It also allows a scripting mode.

Solution 9 - Html

This is certainly hacky, but if you want to work locally without making any external request (to live.js, for example), or run any local server, I think this might be useful. This is not specific to web development, you can adopt similar strategy to any other workflow.

You will need two tiny tools (which are present in almost all distribution repos): inotify-tools and xdotool.

First get the ID of your Firefox and your editor window using xdotool.

$ xdotool search --name "Mozilla Firefox"
60817411
60817836
$ xdotool search --name "Pluma"  # Pluma is my editor
94371842

Depending on the number of processes running, you will get one or more window ID. Use xdotool windowactivate <ID> to know which one you want (the focus changes to the respective window).

Use inotifywait -e close_write to monitor changes to your local file and when you save the file using your editor, change focus to your browser, reload xdotool key CTRL+R and focus back to your editor. This is so instantaneous you will not notice nothing.

Also, inotifywait exits on change, so you might have to do it in a loop. Here is a minimum working example (in Bash in your working directory).

while /usr/bin/true
do
    inotifywait -e close_write index.html;
    xdotool windowactivate 60917411;  # Switch to Firefox
    xdotool key CTRL+R;               # Reload Firefox
    xdotool windowactivate 94371842   # Switch back to Pluma
done

You can use inotifywait to watch for the entire directory or some selected files in your directory.
You can write a script that can automate is easily.
This works on Linux (I've tested this on Void Linux.)

Solution 10 - Html

You can use live.js with a tampermonkey script to avoid having to include https://livejs.com/live.js in your HTML file.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Auto reload
// @author       weirane
// @version      0.1
// @match        http://127.0.0.1/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';
    if (Number(window.location.port) === 8000) {
        const script = document.createElement('script');
        script.src = 'https://livejs.com/live.js';
        document.body.appendChild(script);
    }
})();

With this tampermonkey script, the live.js script will be automatically inserted to pages whose address matches http://127.0.0.1:8000/*. You can change the port according to your need.

Solution 11 - Html

I think that you can solve it by using some ajax requests after a determinate interval. You can do a request to CSS files and then if you don't get the "not modified" header you delete your css and load it again. For dynamic files you do a request and store the response and then every time you make a request to that file you compare the response to the latest.

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Charles Roper	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Html	Charles Roper	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Html	nicorac	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Html	Aamir Shahzad	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Html	Alysko	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Html	bob	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Html	Sampson	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Html	Mike Buckbee	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 8 - Html	Att Righ	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 9 - Html	sigsegv	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 10 - Html	weirane	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 11 - Html	mck89	View Answer on Stackoverflow