Mix phx.server does not recompile on changes!

1. What editor are you using (there are known issues with vim and one of its plugins)
2. Have you installed the dependencies to make filesystem watching work? I’m not sure if there is a fallback to FS polling when the necessary tools arent available.

1: VSCode right now
2: What dependencies? I’ve never had this issue with other Phoenix projects

I’ve got phoenix_live_reload installed!

If other projects on the same computer work, then you probably have the system level dependencies.

Then I’d try the usual, simply remove deps and _build folder and try again.

I removed deps and _build which forced it to recompile a file system watcher. But it still doesn’t recompile on changes

Actually it seems to have been solved now. I assume thanks to your advice. Thanks

Nope. The root cause seems to be that I ran it in a tmux session.

Huh? I run through tmux excessively, nor do I see any way that tmux would cause such an issue, can you elaborate more? o.O?

Well it turned out to just be a coincidence that it worked without tmux. It seems to work sometimes. It is really annoying. So Views are recompiled on change but controllers and other application code are rarely.

In my experience changes to the controllers usually recompile when the page is reloaded, but the controllers don’t recompile directly after code changes because they aren’t being watched for changes by live_reload, but if needed, you should be able to add them in config/dev.exs.

# config/dev.exs

...
# Watch static and templates for browser reloading.
config :my_app, MyApp.Endpoint,
  live_reload: [
    patterns: [
      ~r{priv/static/.*(js|css|png|jpeg|jpg|gif|svg)$},
      ~r{priv/gettext/.*(po)$},
+     ~r{lib/my_app_web/controllers/.*(ex)$},
      ~r{lib/my_app_web/views/.*(ex)$},
      ~r{lib/my_app_web/templates/.*(eex)$}
    ]
  ]

...

I’m guessing they were excluded from the live_reload patterns for a reason. Too many errors that way maybe?

Yeah I did not explain my self properly. It does not recompile controllers and any app code in lib/app on reload. That is the problem. Views are properly compiled on change.

It seems like Elixir doesn’t know that any files has changed. If I type recompile in iex I get :noop sometimes.