When you are developing for Confluence,

it is often useful to disable the caching of the velocity templates so that you don't have to restart the server to see velocity changes

.

Perform the following modifications before starting the server, or restart it afterwards:

  1. Edit ./confluence/src/etc/java/velocity.properties (or /WEB-INF/classes/velocity.properties if you are using the webapp).
  2. Set all the "...resource.loader.cache" values to false.
  3. Set the "class.resource.loader.cache" to false.
  4. Set "velocimacro.library.autoreload" to true (uncomment the line if necessary).

This will allow even the macro library (macros.vm) to reload automatically.