godemon

godemon is a tool that runs a command, monitors for changes to files, and restarts the command automatically whenever files change.

It is great for:

Restarting a development server whenever you change source code
Running tests whenever you change source code
Mirroring a directory to another location, using a tool like rsync
Lots of other things!

It is inspired by nodemon which is a similar tool written in JavaScript.

Goals

Generic: Does not give preference to any language or framework (even Go). Can run arbitrary comands when changing arbitrary files.
Configurable: There is no "one size fits all" approach to file watchers, so godemon gives you fine-grained control over the paths that are included or ignored. For more advanced users, it also lets you control which signals are used to restart your process, since different processes respond differently to different signals.
Strong defaults: godemon ships with a default ignore list and also treats .gitignore files as additional ignore patterns. These defaults can be turned off via config options.

Status

godemon has been tested on Mac and Linux. It has not yet been tested on Windows.

The command line interface and config file format are not yet stable.

Installation

The easiest way to install godemon is with the go CLI:

go install github.com/bduffany/godemon/cmd/godemon@latest

Basic usage

The godemon command can be used as follows:

godemon [options ...] <command> [args ...]

By default, the given command is executed whenever any file in the current directory changes.

Examples

To watch the current directory (recursively) and run a command on any change:

godemon command

To watch multiple directories, use --watch or -w. When using this flag, the current directory needs to be passed explicitly, otherwise it's assumed that you only want to watch /some/other/dir (in this example).

godemon --watch . --watch /some/other/dir command

To only restart on changes to certain paths or patterns, use --only or -o:

godemon --only '*.ts' --only '*.tsx' command

To ignore changes to certain paths or patterns, use --ignore or -i:

godemon --ignore '**/build/**' --ignore '**/dist/**' command

Default ignored patterns

The default ignored patterns are listed in default_ignore.go.

To disable the default ignore list, pass --no-default-ignore.

By default, godemon also ignores patterns that are listed in .gitignore files for any watched paths which are contained in a Git repository. To disable this behavior, pass --no-gitignore.