watcheagle: A Simple File Watcher and Process Restarter (Fork of watchcat)

watcheagle is a lightweight command-line tool that monitors a directory for file changes and automatically restarts a specified process when a modification is detected. It's designed for development environments where you want to automatically reload your application on code changes. This project is based on the original watchcat but has been simplified and optimized for ease of use.

Goal

The primary goal of watcheagle is to provide a simple, reliable, and efficient way to automatically restart a process when files in a directory change. This is useful for rapid development cycles, automatically testing code, or automatically refreshing content on file updates.

Key Features

• Easy to Use: Simple command-line interface.
• Automatic Process Restart: Restarts your application whenever relevant files are modified.
• Fork of watchcat: Leaner and more straightforward, building upon the foundation of watchcat.
• Optional Source Directory: Specify the directory to watch, defaulting to the current directory.

Installation

pip install watcheagle

Usage

Invoke watcheagle from the command line, providing the command to execute and optionally the directory to watch.

watcheagle <command_to_execute> [--source <directory>]

Examples

1. Restarting a Python script in the current directory:

   watcheagle python main.py
   

   This command will execute python main.py and watch for changes in the current directory. Any file modification will trigger a restart of the main.py script.

2. Restarting a Node.js application monitoring a specific directory:

   watcheagle node app.js --source ./src
   

   This command will execute node app.js and monitor the ./src directory.

3. Using with a shell script:

   watcheagle ./build_and_run.sh --source ./code
   

   This command assumes you have a build_and_run.sh script that builds your project and then runs it. It will watch the ./code directory for changes.

4. Monitoring current directory with react application

   watcheagle yarn start --source ./
   

   This is equivalent to running yarn start, and the tool will restart yarn if a file is changed in the current directory

Optional Arguments

• --source <directory>: Specify the directory to watch for changes. If not provided, watcheagle defaults to the current working directory.

.watchignore (Excluding Files and Directories - Original watchcat feature)

To exclude specific files or directories from being monitored, create a .watchignore file in the root directory being watched. Use fnmatch patterns. The changes may occur as implemented in watchcat original(exclude implementation).

Example .watchignore Usage

# Ignore the logs directory and its output
logs/
*.log

# Ignore temp files
temp_*

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to fork the repository, make improvements, and submit pull requests.

License

This project is under the MIT License.