Reloading submodules in IPython

IPython comes with some automatic reloading magic:

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

It will reload all changed modules every time before executing a new line. The way this works is slightly different than dreload. Some caveats apply, type %autoreload? to see what can go wrong.

If you want to always enable this settings, modify your IPython configuration file ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py[1] and appending:

c.InteractiveShellApp.extensions = ['autoreload']     
c.InteractiveShellApp.exec_lines = ['%autoreload 2']

Credit to @Kos via a comment below.

[1] If you don't have the file ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py, you need to call ipython profile create first. Or the file may be located at $IPYTHONDIR.

In IPython 0.12 (and possibly earlier), you can use this:

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

This is essentially the same as the answer by pv., except that the extension has been renamed and is now loaded using %load_ext.

For some reason, neither %autoreload, nor dreload seem to work for the situation when you import code from one notebook to another. Only plain Python reload works:

reload(module)

Based on [1].

IPython offers dreload() to recursively reload all submodules. Personally, I prefer to use the %run() magic command (though it does not perform a deep reload, as pointed out by John Salvatier in the comments).