Live Server for Julia

This is a simple and lightweight development web-server written in Julia, based on HTTP.jl. It has live-reload capability, i.e. when modifying a file, every browser (tab) currently displaying the corresponding page is automatically refreshed.

LiveServer is inspired from Python's http.server and Node's browsersync.

To install it in Julia ≥ 1.6, use the package manager with

pkg> add LiveServer

Infrequently, you may see an error message in your console while using LiveServer that does not interrupt the server and does not otherwise affect your ability to see updates in the browser. This error message will look like

┌ LogLevel(1999): handle_connection handler error
│   exception =
│    IOError: write: broken pipe (EPIPE)

You can basically ignore this message, it's a problem with HTTP.jl.

If your application depends on LiveServer and you'd like to avoid having that kind of messages being shown to your users, you can consider using LoggingExtras.jl which allows you to filter out messages based on their provenance.

We experimented with shipping LoggingExtras in LiveServer but ended up rolling that back as it made other applications less stable.

For Julia < 1.6, you can use LiveServer's version 0.9.2:

pkg> add LiveServer@0.9.2

For Julia [1.0, 1.3), you can use LiveServer's version 0.7.4:

pkg> add LiveServer@0.7.4

LiveServer is a small package and fast to load with one main functionality (serve), it can be convenient to make it a shell command: (I'm using the name lss here but you could use something else):

alias lss='julia -e "import LiveServer as LS; LS.serve(launch_browser=true)"'

you can then use lss in any directory to show a directory listing in your browser, and if the directory has an index.html then that will be rendered in your browser.

The main function LiveServer exports is serve which starts listening to the current folder and makes its content available to a browser. The following code creates an example directory and serves it:

julia> using LiveServer
julia> LiveServer.example() # creates an "example/" folder with some files
julia> cd("example")
julia> serve() # starts the local server & the file watching
✓ LiveServer listening on http://localhost:8000/ ...
  (use CTRL+C to shut down)

Open a Browser and go to http://localhost:8000/ to see the content being rendered; try modifying files (e.g. index.html) and watch the changes being rendered immediately in the browser.

In the REPL:

julia> using LiveServer
julia> serve(host="0.0.0.0", port=8001, dir=".") # starts the remote server & the file watching
✓ LiveServer listening on http://0.0.0.0:8001...
  (use CTRL+C to shut down)

In the terminal:

julia -e 'using LiveServer; serve(host="0.0.0.0", port=8001, dir=".")'

Open a browser and go to https://localhost:8001/ to see the rendered content of index.html or, if it doesn't exist, the content of the directory. You can set the port to a custom number. This is similar to the http.server in Python.

servedocs is a convenience function that runs Documenter along with LiveServer to watch your doc files for any changes and render them in your browser when modifications are detected.

Assuming you are in directory/to/YourPackage.jl, that you have a docs/ folder as prescribed by Documenter.jl and LiveServer installed in your global environment, you can run:

$ julia

pkg> activate docs

julia> using YourPackage, LiveServer

julia> servedocs()
[ Info: SetupBuildDirectory: setting up build directory.
[ Info: ExpandTemplates: expanding markdown templates.
...
└ Deploying: ✘
✓ LiveServer listening on http://localhost:8000/ ...
  (use CTRL+C to shut down)

Open a browser and go to http://localhost:8000/ to see your docs being rendered; try modifying files (e.g. docs/index.md) and watch the changes being rendered in the browser.

To run the server with one line of code, run:

$ julia --project=docs -ie 'using YourPackage, LiveServer; servedocs()'

Note: this works with Literate.jl as well. See the docs.

See also issue #135 and related PRs.

• servedocs(), navigate to literate, images should show
• serve() navigate manually to docs/build/ should show, remove trailing slash in URL docs/build should redirect to docs/build/
• serve(dir=...) should work + when navigating to assets etc