How to integrate Jekyll watch with Vagrant?

[Antonio Spinelli]

I created a VM with Vagrant to run jekyll server, when I edit the files inside VM it works, but when I edit in my workstation, the changes not applied.

How to do it work?

My Vagrantfile

[Parker Moore]

The watch and detach flags cannot be used together. Remove detach and you should be good to go.

[Matt Rogers]

If you want to use Vagrant to run jekyll, you'll also have to use your VM to develop as well, unless you sync the site files between the your workstation and the VM with a shared folder, rsync, or some other mechanism.

[Antonio Spinelli]

@parkr and @mattr-

thanks for attention.

Because that "limit", I executed the command vagrant ssh -c 'cd /vagrant && jekyll build' in my workstation to see my updates

[Hans Kristian Flaatten]

This version of jekyll works with watch inside Vagrant/VirtualBox:
gem uninstall jekyll
gem install jekyll -v 1.2.1

Use --watch with --force_polling to enable reload when files changes outside of Vagrant.

[Parker Moore]

All versions of Jekyll should work great with --watch.

[Hans Kristian Flaatten]

Yeah, but not inside VirtualBox (via Vagrant).

[Parker Moore]

Vagrant doesn't work with auto regen? Is the sync feature too slow?

[Hans Kristian Flaatten]

Well, Vagrant doesn't actually do the syncing, it is just a glorified configuration tool to set up and provision the virtual machines. I'm using it on my Mac with Oracle VirtualBox to run my Jekyll sites locally. Here is the documentation for VirtualBox shared folders.

sudo mount for the shared folder gives me the following information:

vagrant on /vagrant type vboxsf (uid=1000,gid=1000,rw)

My hunch tells me that vboxsf does not trigger a file stystem inotify event?! And that might be the reason that Jekyll is not picking up the change?

Jekyll is not alone on not picking up changes in synced files inside Vagrant/VirtualBox, a quick google search yields a dozen or more results on this for various tools. What I can't quite figure out is what changed in Jekyll 1.2.1, because this version picks up changes immediately and regenerates the site as it is supposed to?

[Parker Moore]

The version of Listen is what would have changed. If you want the later features of Jekyll, try the --force-polling option when running build or serve with --watch

[Hans Kristian Flaatten]

Thanks a million @parkr 👍 --force_polling works like a charm!