When I run docpad run docpad would run a preview node server defaulting at port 9778. If I navigate to localhost:9778 I would see the site as being served from the out directory.
But if I delete a file now from the out directory, say the 'out/index.html', and refresh the page, it doesn't give me a 404 error (even if I clear the browser cache). If I create a 'out/hello.html' in the out folder when the server is running, I can navigate to that page. If I delete 'out/hello.html' after and try to navigate to it again it would give me a 404 as expected.
Thus I'm confused as how the preview server works. Does it have any cache mechanism that somehow caches any docpad generated files (since the 'hello.html' is not docpad generated and thus produces a 404 after removal)?
DocPad maps urls to the documents for faster lookup times, however it seems that in this case it has gotten out of date for index files. It would be a bug and something that should be addressed in the DocPad caching algorithm - posting it on the docpad github issue tracker would be great :)