I’m happy to announce that [pywatch][pywatch-git] is ready for use, I think.
What does it do? It’s both a Python module and a command line client that allow you to run arbitrary shell commands whenever changes occur in a list of specified files.
Here’s an example:
pywatch --help Usage: pywatch [options] "command" file1 file2 ... Options: -h, --help show this help message and exit -v, --verbose Output timestamp when commands are run. chris@pinko:~/Code/pywatch$ pywatch -v ./bin/test src/pywatch/watcher.py src/pywatch/tests.py Running commands at 2009-06-20 12:00:13.226711 Running zope.testing.testrunner.layer.UnitTests tests: Set up zope.testing.testrunner.layer.UnitTests in 0.000 seconds. Ran 4 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 2.003 seconds. Tearing down left over layers: Tear down zope.testing.testrunner.layer.UnitTests in 0.000 seconds. Running commands at 2009-06-20 12:00:34.422557 Test-module import failures: Module: pywatch.tests Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/chris/Code/pywatch/src/pywatch/tests.py", line 1, in import makethistestblowup ImportError: No module named makethistestblowup Test-modules with import problems: pywatch.tests Total: 0 tests, 0 failures, 0 errors in 0.000 seconds. Running commands at 2009-06-20 12:00:44.600708 Running zope.testing.testrunner.layer.UnitTests tests: Set up zope.testing.testrunner.layer.UnitTests in 0.000 seconds. Ran 4 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 2.006 seconds. Tearing down left over layers: Tear down zope.testing.testrunner.layer.UnitTests in 0.000 seconds.
So far I’ve been using it to automatically run tests on personal projects, including [pywatch][pywatch-git] and [baseboards][baseboards-git].
You could use it to run other arbitrary commands whenever you change a file, but running tests was the particular itch I was trying to scratch.
It’s available at [GitHub][pywatch-git] and [PyPI][pywatch-pypi]
[pywatch-git]: http://github.com/cmheisel/pywatch/tree/master
[pywatch-pypi]: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pywatch/0.3
[baseboards-git]: http://github.com/cmheisel/django-baseboard/tree/master
How do you install and run it? No matter in which directory I run scripts/pywatch, I get an import error.
Running “python setup.py install” gives “ImportError: No module named setuptools”. I’m running on Ubuntu 13.10 with Python 2.7.6. Does this require Python 3.0?
Okay, I was able to install PIP and use that to install pywatch.
Does it support wildcards?
James – yup it should!