dj-watchfiles

Use watchfiles in Django's autoreloader.

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dj-watchfiles is a fork of django-watchfiles, adds support for managing verbosity level.

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Requirements

Python 3.9 to 3.13 supported.

Django 4.2 to 5.1 supported.

Installation

1. Install with pip:

   python -m pip install dj-watchfiles

2. Install with uv:

   uv add dj-watchfiles

3. Add dj-watchfiles to your INSTALLED_APPS:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
        ...,
        "dj_watchfiles",
        ...,
    ]

That's it!

Verbosity configuration

You can control the verbosity level either through Django settings or CLI.

1. Django Settings

    WATCHFILES = {
      "verbosity": 2,  # Default is 1
    }

2. CLI

    python manage.py runserver --verbosity 2

Verbosity Levels

Verbosity level	Log level	What you'll see
0	ERROR	Only errors
1	WARNING	Warnings and errors (Default)
2	INFO	Info, warnings, and errors
3	DEBUG	All messages including debug info

Other settings you can get from the project settings WATCHFILES, e.g.:

WATCHFILES = {
     "watch_filter": "path.to.custom_filter",
     "raise_interrupt": False,
     "debug": True,  # False by default
   }

Note: Setting debug = True is more like a hard override that ignores the verbosity setting completely and sets the verbosity level to 3 (DEBUG level).

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Django doesn't provide an official API for alternative autoreloader classes. Therefore, dj-watchfiles monkey-patches django.utils.autoreload to make its own reloader the only available class. You can tell it is installed as runserver will list WatchfilesReloader as in use:

$ ./manage.py runserver
Watching for file changes with WatchfilesReloader
...

Unlike Django's built-in WatchmanReloader, there is no need for a fallback to StatReloader, since watchfiles implements its own internal fallback to using stat.