Aya is used to sync a directory tree to a remote machine and run a command on the remote machine within the copied directory tree.
Create a file called .aya in the root of the directory tree you wish to copy to the remote machine. If the .aya file is nonempty, it should contain a list of filename globs, one per line, indicating which files should not be copied to the remote machine.
To execute a command remotely within a directory tree containing .aya file in its root, run
aya [username@]host:path command
Suppose we have a project rooted at /home/user/proj; we wish to copy /home/user/proj to beefymachine:/tmp/proj and run src/regressiontest.py on beefymachine. To make the data transfer go faster, we'll avoid copying any object files.
First, create the file /home/user/proj/.aya:
*.o
Then, in /home/user/proj/src/, execute
aya beefymachine:/tmp/proj ./regressiontest.py
Aya will copy all the files in /home/user/proj, except any files ending in .o, to the directory /tmp/proj on beefymachine and execute /tmp/proj/src/regressiontest.py on beefymachine in the working directory /tmp/proj/src.
Aya uses rsync to do the copying so that repeated executions should be quite fast if little data have changed.