While working on the Twisted server for A World Of Photo, I quickly began missing the convenience of having it automatically restart during development when I had made changes to the code. It turns out that the autoreload module that Django uses is actually pretty generic [1]. One thing Twisted doesn’t like is that the code which checks for file changes is run inside the main thread, and the actual app in a separate thread. That’s easily reversed though. You can find a patched version on bitbucket.

Then, all you need is a simple twistd wrapper:

from twisted.scripts import twistd
from pyutils import autoreload

autoreload.main(twistd.run)

[1] http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4072