Debian

Download latest deb package from GitHub releases page and install it with dpkg.

sudo dpkg -i fs-watcher_X.Y.Z-0_all.deb

In addition to Watcher itself, it will install:

• sample configuration file to /etc/watcher.ini

• systemd service fs-watcher (in disabled state).

To start using Watcher you must change /etc/watcher.ini to suit your needs and enable/start fs-watcher service.

Pip

System-wide using pip:

sudo pip install fs-watcher

sudo pip3 install fs-watcher

This command will install:

• Python modules for Watcher

• sample configuration file

• samples of startup scripts

• executable to start Watcher

Use following command to check exact locations:

pip show -f fs-watcher

There are samples of startup scripts. Use your init system manual to install them properly. Check/fix path to Watcher executable in samples before using, by default it is assumed to be /usr/sbin/watcher.

For systemd:

cp share/init/fs-watcher.service /etc/systemd/system/fs-watcher.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable fs-watcher
systemctl start fs-watcher

For SysV:

cp share/init/fs-watcher.sysvinit /etc/init.d/fs-watcher
update-rc.d fs-watcher defaults
/etc/init.d/fs-watcher start

For OpenRC:

cp share/init/fs-watcher.openrc /etc/init.d/fs-watcher
rc-update add fs-watcher default
/etc/init.d/fs-watcher start

Debug mode

You can start Watcher with debug positional argument to prevent it from forking to the background and log messages to stdout:

watcher debug

Increasing the amount of inotify watchers

There is a limit of max number of inotify watchers. When this limit is not enough to monitor all jobs, the limit must be increased for Watcher to work properly. You can find following error in log when facing this limit:

add_watch: cannot watch /...... WD=-1, Errno=No space left on device (ENOSPC)

If you are running Debian, RedHat, or another similar Linux distribution, run the following in a terminal to increase this limit:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

Increasing the amount of queued events

There is a limit of max queued events. When this limit is not enough to monitor all jobs, the limit must be increased for Watcher to work properly. You can find following warning in log when facing this limit:

pyinotify - WARNING - Event queue overflowed.

If you are running Debian, RedHat, or another similar Linux distribution, run the following in a terminal to increase this limit:

echo fs.inotify.max_queued_events=65536 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p