mqtt-watchdir 1.3

Recursively watch a directory for modifications and publish file content to an MQTT broker

This simple Python program portably watches a directory recursively and publishes the content of newly created and modified files as payload to an MQTT broker. Files which are deleted are published with a NULL payload.

The path to the directory to watch recursively (default .), as well as a list of files to ignore (*.swp, *.o, *.pyc), the broker host (localhost) and port number (1883) must be specified in the program, together with the topic prefix to which to publish to (watch/).

Installation

git clone https://github.com/jpmens/mqtt-watchdir.git
cd mqtt-watchdir
virtualenv watchdir
source watchdir/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Configuration

• TOPIC_PREFIX is prepended onto the relative path of the file being accessed, and may be None.

Testing

Launch mosquitto_sub:

mosquitto_sub -v -t 'watch/#'

Launch this program and, in another terminal, try something like this:

echo Hello World > message
echo JP > myname
rm myname

whereupon, on the first window, you should see:

watch/message Hello World
watch/myname JP
watch/myname (null)

Requirements

• watchdog, a Python library to monitor file-system events.

• Mosquitto’s Python module

Related utilities & Credits

• Roger Light (of Mosquitto fame) created mqttfs, a FUSE driver (in C) which works similarly.

• Roger Light (yes, the same busy gentleman) also made treewatch, a program to watch a set of directories and execute a program when there is a change in the files within the directories.

• Thanks to Karl Palsson for setup.py.