So first of all you should differenciate between phoenix live reload and phoenix code reloader.
Phoenix live reload makes a website reload when any of the files you have a pattern for changed. That’s a JS feature and hence only works with html pages. A json response in a browser cannot execute JS and therefore the server cannot tell the JS client to reload the current page. This is even a separate package, because it only makes sense in a limited context.
Phoenix code reloader is a different feature. It doesn’t cause http requests being made, but if there happens to be an http request it makes sure to recompile any changed files, so the response is built using latest changes in source files and not using stale logic. That plug is part of the phoenix library and therefore generally available if you use phoenix. That one is useful to developing any webserver functionality no matter if html or any other content types are served.
