shelldocs dev is the daily-driver runner : dotnet watch run under the hood, with the watch set extended to include markdown so editing a .md file re-triggers the navigation-graph rebuild without a manual restart.

shelldocs dev [--dir <dir>] [--port <n>]

Run from your docs project root:

shelldocs dev

Serves at http://localhost:5000 and watches:

• .cs (C# source)
• .razor (component source)
• .css and .js (styling / interop)
• content/**/*.md (docs pages)

Editing any watched file triggers a hot-reload : Blazor's rebuild-and-refresh for source files, ShellDocs' nav-graph rebuild for markdown.

shelldocs dev --port 5200

Binds to http://localhost:5200 instead. Useful when 5000 is taken by another Blazor project.

shelldocs dev --dir docs/MyDocs.Docs --port 5200

Points at a specific project directory instead of the working dir. Handy in monorepos where you're normally in ../src/ but want to spin up the docs site.

dev shells out to:

dotnet watch --project <csproj> --non-interactive run --urls http://localhost:<port>

--non-interactive disables dotnet watch's prompt for "restart on non-hot-reloadable changes" : ShellDocs sites usually just want the file-watcher to rebuild without asking.

Ctrl+C in the CLI forwards to the child process's entire process tree, so dotnet watch shuts down cleanly.

shelldocs dev is a thin convenience over dotnet watch run. If you'd rather run watch yourself : cd docs/MyDocs.Docs && dotnet watch run does the same thing (minus the --non-interactive flag and the markdown-in-watch-set optimization).