Hot Reload

During development, restarting your bot after every code change is slow. The --watch flag on grace run keeps the process alive and reloads your extensions in place whenever a file under ./bot changes.

grace run --watch

How It Works

--watch sets app.watch = True. On setup_hook, Bot starts a Watcher that observes the ./bot directory recursively using watchdog. When a .py file is created, modified, or deleted, the corresponding module is reloaded, and Bot.on_reload unloads then reloads every extension so the new code takes effect.

# bot/extensions/task_cog.py — edit and save while the bot is running

@hybrid_command(name="ping")
async def ping(self, ctx):
    await ctx.send("pong")  # this shows up next command sync, no restart needed

What Gets Reloaded

The watcher reloads extension modules — everything discovered via app.extension_modules (i.e. bot/extensions/*.py files exposing setup). Changes to models, config files, or code outside bot/ still require a restart.

Disabling It

--watch is off by default (grace run alone does not enable it) — it's meant for local development, not production:

grace run --no-watch   # equivalent to plain `grace run`

See Creating a Bot for the full grace run walkthrough.