fswatch

fswatch is a developer tool that triggers commands in response to filesystem changes. Works well on Mac, Linux, and should also works on Windows.

Install

go get -u -v github.com/asktalk/fswatch

Quick start

Step 1

Create a config file .fsw.yml, quickly generated by the following command.

fswatch init

config file example

desc: Auto generated by fswatch [fswatch]
triggers:
- pattens:
  - '**/*.go'
  - '**/*.c'
  # also support '!**/test_*.go'
  env:
    DEBUG: "1"
  # if shell is true, $cmd will be wrapped with `bash -c`
  shell: true
  cmd: go test -v
  delay: 100ms
  stop_timeout:1s
  signal: "KILL"
  kill_signal: "SIGTERM"
watch_paths:
- .
watch_depth: 5

Step 2

Run fswatch directly. Every time you edit a file. Command go test -v will be called.

$ fswatch
fswatch >>> exec start: go test -v
# github.com/codeskyblue/fswatch
./fswatch.go:281: main redeclared in this block
	previous declaration at ./config.go:354
fswatch >>> program exited: exit status 2
fswatch >>> finish in 145.499911ms

You should know

How fswatch kill process

fswatch send signal to all process when restart. (mac and linux killed by pgid, windows by taskkill) Ctrl+C will trigger fswatch quit and kill all process it started.

Pattens

More about the pattens. The patten has the same rule like .gitignore. So you can write like this.

- pattens:
  - '*.go'
  - '!*_test.go'
  - '!**/bindata.go'

main.go changed will trigger command, but a_test.go and libs/bindata.go will be ignored.

FAQs

too many open files

For mac, run the following command

sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=20480
sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=18000
ulimit -S -n 2048

Friendly link:

codeskyblue-fswatch, This open source project is no longer working and has been out of repair for a long time. I recreated this project and continued to maintain the project.

LICENSE

Under MIT