apinstein/watchngo

A php-native inotify-based file watcher to easily trigger compilation. Debounces and coalesces changes to multiple files related to the same desired action.

dev-master 2013-10-22 17:35 UTC

Requires

• php: >=5.2.0

MIT

• Alan Pinstein

• watcher

README

A php-native inotify-based file watcher to easily trigger compilation. Debounces and coalesces changes to multiple files related to the same desired action.

Background

We have a large app with 4-5 different things that need "watch & recompile" functionality (compass, coffeescript, etc).

I spent hours trying to get various solutions like guard working but was never able to get them configured to work properly. Also in many cases they didn't notice events on certain machines, I think due to the different save mechanisms of say vim vs TextMate.

Besides, I am sick of having to use ruby/node projects to manage tasks in my PHP codebase, and am trying to help the PHP community have access to more robust tooling.

• guard for php
• grunt for php

Features

• Configure as many different "groups" as you want
• Specify a glob of files to monitor
• Specify an action to perform when a change is detected in the monitored files
• Each groups' various watches are coalseced and de-bounced, such that if you save all on various files in a project, the action will run only once, and only after the last detected change, debounced at 2s

Status

The script completley works, but it's obviously terrible code. I was just testing out the basic parts as fast as possible.

Going forward I'd like to refactor this into a proper CLI app with a config file, and possible plugins which can generate configs for common projects like (ie a compass generator could inspect your compass configs and auto-generate watchngo configs).