About Watcher

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.

This fork is a rewritting of the code using python-daemon implementation of PEP3143

Requirements

You need Python 2.7 and the following modules that can be installed with pip:

• pyinotify
• python-daemon
• lockfile

To install pip on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install pip

To install the modules:

sudo pip install python-daemon lockfile pyinotify

For Python 3, install python-daemon-3K instead of python-daemon:

sudo pip install python-daemon-3K lockfile pyinotify

Configuration

See the 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.

Starting the Daemon

Make sure watcher.py is marked as executable:

chmod +x watcher.py

Start the daemon with:

./watcher.py start

Stop it with:

./watcher.py stop

Restart it with:

./watcher.py restart

If you don't want the daemon to fork to the background, start it with

./watcher.py debug