#4081·mkdocs

On WSL `mkdocs serve` fails to live reload

Author: skamathCreated Jan 31, 2026Updated May 18, 2026

mkdocs serve is expected to start a live-reload development server, but I don’t see any live-reload behavior by default on WSL (ext4 filesystem).

To rule out editor or filesystem issues, I tested with touch docs/index.md and echo "## all is well" >> docs/index.md; the page still did not reload. I also verified file events using inotifywait, which works as expected.

I later discovered the internal --livereload option. When this flag is explicitly provided, live reload works correctly. This suggests that live reload may not be enabled by default, or that this behavior isn’t clearly documented.