Feature Request: Allow users to specify additional paths to watch for changes

[rparrett]

Motivated by some friction experienced by Bevy maintainers, discussed here: bevyengine/bevy#16431 (reply in thread)

As well as a project of mine where I am including content that is necessarily in another directory, and would love it if Zola would reload when it changes.

edit: Oops, it looks like this was previously suggested in the forum, but never received a response.

[cart]

To elaborate:

1. We have a "news" markdown page that calls a release_notes shortcode
2. The release_notes shortcode calls load_data() to load a _release-notes.toml file, which is an index that contains many "release note" entries containing things like a title and a link to the release note entry markdown.
3. We iterate over all of the "release note" entries and call load_data(release_note.file_name) to retrieve the markdown and render it.

The problem is that if we change one of the individual release note markdown files, the final rendered page is not updated.

Here is a link to the shortcode: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/blob/main/templates/shortcodes/release_notes.md?plain=1

And here is a link to one of the news articles that doesnt hot-reload when a release note entry changes: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/blob/main/content/news/2024-11-29-bevy-0.15/index.md

And here is a link to one of the release note entries that connects to that article: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy-website/blob/main/release-content/0.15/release-notes/14791_Required_Components.md

[Keats]

I think that's fine to add as an argument to zola serve. I'm assuming we're fine with just completely reloading the site when something changes right?

[rparrett]

It would be nice to be able to configure this with an array in config.toml so that contributors don't need to do anything extra beyond zola serve.

I have this working in a branch, and can open a PR if that sounds okay. There may be some small implementation details to discuss.

[Keats]

I would prefer that to be cli arguments, there are no serve specific things in config.toml right now. You can always write the command required in a makefile or docs