Code Chronicles

Getting instant feedback for code changes is essential when developing a web application. Typical workflows for Python web applications involve a hot-reload functionality for the development web server that will automatically restart the server when changes to python files are detected. However, the server will not automatically restart when changes to HTML, CSS, or JavaScript files are detected. When those files are updated, you must manually restart the server for the changes to occur. Moreover, this typical workflow will not automatically refresh your web browser when you update files, so you must manually refresh the web page to see the changes.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to automatically hot-reload your FastAPI and Flask projects that use template engines like Jinja with web servers like uvicorn or gunicorn. After reading, you will be able to automatically restart your server and refresh your browser when Python, HTML, CSS, and other files change—no manual intervention required.

I wrote the board game Connect 4 for my website! 😀 Here’s a link to it if you want to check it out. The game can be played against another human or an AI opponent. It can even be played AI-vs-AI, which I find kind of fun to watch – and which made testing the AI out much easier and more scientific (more on that later). This is the story of how I wrote the AI for the game intuitively, through some trial and error. This post was updated with a significantly enhanced AI version 6 a couple days after the initial release.