Docker Compose Watch, a tool to improve the inner loop of application development, is now generally available. Hot reload is one of those engineering workflow features that’s seemingly minor and simple but has cumulative benefits. If you can trust your app will update seamlessly as you code, without losing state, it’s one less thing pulling your focus from the work at hand. You can see your frontend components come to life while you stay in your IDE.
With containerized application development, there are more steps than Alt+Tab and hitting reload in your browser. Even with caching, rebuilding the image and re-creating the container — especially after waiting on stop and start time — can disrupt focus.
We built Docker Compose Watch to smooth away these workflow papercuts. We have learned from many people using our open source Docker Compose project for local development. Now we are natively addressing common workflow friction we observe, like the use case of hot reload for frontend development...
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