fs-watcher 1.0.5

Daemon that watches specified files/folders for changes and fires commands in response to those changes

Watcher is a daemon that watches specified files/folders for changes and fires commands in response to those changes. It is similar to incron, however, configuration uses a simpler to read ini file instead of a plain text file. Unlike incron it can also recursively monitor directories.

It’s written in Python, making it easier to hack.

• Source on GitHub
• Packages on PyPI

This fork is a rewritting of the code using python-daemon implementation of PEP3143 with additional features:

• async commands executing which allows several copies of command can be executed simultaneously for single job
• capturing command output to separate log file
• exclude watching files by regular expression
• perform actions on successful/failure command completion.

Requirements

Watcher supports both Python 2.7 and Python 3.x. It has following dependencies which can be installed with your package manager or pip:

• pyinotify
• python-daemon
• lockfile
• chardet
• future

To install dependencies on Debian:

sudo apt-get install python-pyinotify python-daemon python-lockfile python-chardet python-future

sudo apt-get install python3-pyinotify python3-daemon python3-lockfile python3-chardet python3-future

To install dependencies on Gentoo:

emerge -av dev-python/pyinotify dev-python/python-daemon dev-python/lockfile dev-python/chardet dev-python/future

pip will install dependencies automatically.

Installation

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

Configuration

Check provided watcher.ini file for an example job configuration. The config file should reside in /etc/watcher.ini or ~/.watcher.ini. You can also specify the path to the config file as a command line parameter using the --config option.

If you edit the ini file you must restart the daemon for it to reload the configuration.

Usage

usage: watcher [-h] [--version] [-c CONFIG] [-v] {start,stop,restart,debug}

positional arguments:
  {start,stop,restart,debug}
                                                What to do.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                                                Path to the config file (default: None)
  -v, --verbose         verbose output

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