How do I make Firefox auto-refresh on file change?

Question

Does anyone know of an extension for Firefox, or a script or some other mechanism, that can monitor one or more local files. Firefox would auto-refresh or otherwise update i

Answer 1

I think that you can solve it by using some ajax requests after a determinate interval. You can do a request to CSS files and then if you don't get the "not modified" header you delete your css and load it again. For dynamic files you do a request and store the response and then every time you make a request to that file you compare the response to the latest.

Answer 2

There are some IDE's that contain this ability (They'll have a pane within them or some other means to auto-refresh a page on save).

If you want to do this yourself a quick hack is to set the meta refresh on the page to a low value - one or two seconds.

# Will refresh the page content every second
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1" />

Answer 3

Have a look at FileWatcher extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/filewatcher/

• it's a WebExtension, so it works with the latest Firefox
• it has a native app (to be installed locally) that monitors watched files for changes using native OS calls (no polling!) and notifies the WebExtension to let it reload the web page
• reload is driven by rules: a rule contains the page URL (with regular expression support) and its included/excluded local source files
• open source: https://github.com/coolsoft-ita/filewatcher

DISCLAIMER: I'm the author of the extension ;)

Answer 4

Xrefresh with firebug.