Hugo may not be the first static site generator to utilize LiveReload technology, but it’s the first to do it right.
The combination of Hugo’s insane build speed and LiveReload make crafting your content pure joy. Virtually instantly after you hit save your rebuilt content will appear in your browser.
Using LiveReload
Hugo comes with LiveReload built in. There are no additional packages to install. A common way to use Hugo while developing a site is to have Hugo run a server and watch for changes:
$ hugo server
This will run a full functioning web server while simultaneously watching your file system for additions, deletions or changes within your:
- static files
- content
- data files
- layouts
- current theme
- configuration files
Whenever anything changes, Hugo will rebuild the site while continuing to serve the content. As soon as the build is finished, it will tell the browser and silently reload the page. Because most Hugo builds are so fast they are barely noticeable, you merely need to glance at your open browser and you will see the change, already there.
This means that keeping the site open on a second monitor (or another half of your current monitor) allows you to see exactly what your content looks like, without even leaving your text editor.
Disabling Watch
If for some reason you don’t want the Hugo server’s watch functionality, just do:
$ hugo server --watch=false
Disabling LiveReload
LiveReload works by injecting JavaScript into the pages Hugo generates, which creates a connection from the browser web socket client to the Hugo web socket server.
Awesome for development, but not something you would want to do in
production. Since many people use hugo server in production to
instantly display any updated content, we’ve made it easy to disable the
LiveReload functionality:
$ hugo server --disableLiveReload
Notes
You must have a closing </body> tag for LiveReload to work.
Hugo injects the LiveReload <script> before this tag.