mod_development¶
Presents various tools for development. When this module is enabled, templates are recompiled on each web request.
Note
Do not enable this module on production systems, as it severely impacts performance.
Automatic recompilation¶
When this module is enabled, it runs an inotifywait program in the background, which watches files in Zotonic and its site for changes. If it detects changes, it performs certain actions.
- If an .erl file changes, it recompiles and reloads the file on-the-fly. When a module exports notifier functions (observe_... or pid_observe_... functions), these are re-registered with the notification system automatically.
- If a .scss or .less file is touched, it calls lessc to compile it to its .css equivalent.
- If a template file is added, or a dispatch rule changed, it flushes the cache so the template file or the dispatch rule is found.
Note
Automatic recompilation currently only works on Linux and depends on the inotifywait tool, which is part of the inotify-tools package.
