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https://github.com/alloy/kicker

A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher, using OS X FSEvents.
https://github.com/alloy/kicker

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A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher, using OS X FSEvents.

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README 

        
= Kicker



{Build Status}[https://travis-ci.org/alloy/kicker]



A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher.



== Installation



  $ gem install kicker -s http://gemcutter.org



== The short version



  Usage: ./bin/kicker [options] [paths to watch]



    Available recipes: ignore, jstest, rails, ruby.



      -s, --silent                     Keep output to a minimum.

      -q, --quiet                      Quiet output. Don't print timestamps when logging.

      -c, --clear                      Clear console before each run.

      -l, --latency [FLOAT]            The time to collect file change events before acting on them. Defaults to 1 second.

      -r, --recipe [NAME]              A named recipe to load.

      -e, --execute [COMMAND]          The command to execute.

      -b, --ruby [PATH]                Use an alternate Ruby binary for spawned test runners. (Default is `ruby')



== The long version



=== Execute a shell command



Show all files, whenever a change occurs in the current work directory:



  $ kicker -e "ls -l" .



Show all files, whenever a change occurs to a specific file:



  $ kicker -e "ls -l" foo.txt



Or use it as a ghetto-autotest, running tests whenever files change:



  $ kicker -e "ruby test/test_case.rb" test/test_case.rb lib/file.rb



Et cetera.



=== Using recipes



A recipe is a predefined handler. You can use as many as you like, by

specifying them with the --recipe (-r) option.



For instance, when in the root of a typical Ruby on Rails application, using

the rails recipe will map models, concerns, controllers, helpers, and

views to their respective test files. These will then all be ran with Ruby.



A few recipes come shipped with Kicker:

* Typical Ruby library.

* Ruby on Rails, as aforementioned.

* JavaScript tests, to run it needs

  HeadlessSquirrel[http://github.com/Fingertips/Headless-squirrel].

* Ignore, ignores logs, tmp, and svn and git files.



Add your own shared recipes to ~/.kick folder or

current working directory .kick.



=== Project specific handlers



Most of the time, you’ll want to create handlers specific to the project at

hand. This can be done by adding your handlers to a .kick file and

running Kicker from the directory containing it.



This file is reloaded once saved. No need to stop Kicker.



== Writing handlers



Whenever file-change events occur, Kicker will go through a chain of handlers

until that the files list is empty, or the end of the chain is reached.



Handlers are objects that respond to #call. These are typically Proc

objects. (If you know Rack, you’re familiar with this concept.) Every handler

gets passed a list of changed files and can decide whether or not to act on

them. Normally when handling a file, you should remove it from the files list,

unless you want to let the file fall through to another handler. In the same

way, one can add files to handler to the files list.



==== Time for a simple example



  process do |files|

    execute("rake docs:generate && open -a Safari html/index.html") if files.delete("README.rdoc")

  end



A handler is defined by passing a block to process. Which is one of

three possible callback chains to add your handlers to, the others being:

pre_process and post_process. See Kernel for more info.



Then README.rdoc is deleted from the files array. If it did exist in

the array and was deleted, a shell command is executed which runs a rake task

to generate rdoc and open the docs with Safari.



==== Something more elaborate.



Consider a Rails application with a mailer. Since the naming convention of

mailer views tend to be fairly application specific, a specific handler has to

be added:



  process do |files|

    test_files = files.take_and_map do |file|

      if path =~ %r{^app/views/mailer/\w+\.erb$}

        'test/unit/mailer_test.rb'



      # elsif ... handle more app specific stuff

      end

    end



    Ruby.run_tests test_files

  end



The files list is iterated over with the Array#take_and_map method, which both

removes and maps the results. This is an easy way to do a common thing in

recipes. See Kicker::ArrayExt for details.



The handler then checks if the file is a mailer view and if so runs the

mailers test case. Ruby.run_tests runs them with something like the following

command:



  execute "ruby -r #{test_files.join(' -r ')} -e ''" unless test_files.empty?



See Kernel for more info on the utility methods.



To load recipes from your ~/.kick file:



  recipe :ignore

  ignore(/^data\//)



That’s basically it, just remember that the order of specifying handlers _can_

be important in your decision on where to specify handlers.



== Notifiers



For platform specific notifications we use the notify gem. For supported

backends see: https://github.com/jugyo/notify#feature.



You select the notify backend by setting the NOTIFY environment variable.



  gem install terminal-notifier

  env NOTIFY=terminal-notifier kicker



== Contributors



* Manfred Stienstra (@manfred)

* Cristi Balan (@evilchelu)

* Damir Zekic (@sidonath)

* Adam Keys (@therealadam)