I want code changes to take effect immediately during development. How can I detect changed files and reload them in the running Python (2.7) application?
Edit:
After reading the pages linked by 'Ivo van der Wijk', I think it would be best to restart the web application when code changes - like Django does. So the actual question is: How to monitor file modifications?
This question has been asked a number of times
You can use reload(module) for this, but beware of nasty side effects. For example, existing code will be based on the original code, it will not magically get new attributes or baseclasses added.
This does not make sense for most applications because you will get side effects by using reload. Plus the time you spend on the code that detects changes and reloads all modules could have been spent on just restarting the application. It's very complicated if you import lots of modules or have a project that contains many sub-modules.
In some cases, it's a good idea though. The Django web framework provides a development server (manage.py runserver) that automatically reloads changed modules. Take a look at the django.utils.autoreload - it tests all Python files for modifications using the modification time of the files. As said before, this is only a good idea for some applications. Web applications are somewhat stateless and thus can be reloaded with few to no side effects.