I recently stumbled upon latexmk, which is a neat little tool to automate the process of generating latex documents. The default usage is very simple, just type latexmk -pdf and the program runs the correct number of pdflatex and bibtex on any tex file in the current folder.
The tool is also able to monitor the files for changes and automatically update the pdf accordingly. To do so, use
latexmk -pdf -pvc
Many readers automatically update the display as soon as the pdf file changes, but for my default viewer mupdf, some extra configuration is required. Namely, it is required to create a config file .config/latexmk with the following content:
$pdf_previewer = 'start mupdf'
$pdf_update_method = 2;
$pdf_update_signal = 'SIGHUP'
That is it. For more info, read the docs.