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 your package manager or pip:

• pyinotify
• python-daemon
• lockfile
• chardet

To install modules on Debian:

sudo apt-get install python-pyinotify python-daemon python-lockfile python-chardet

To install modules on Gentoo:

emerge -av dev-python/pyinotify dev-python/python-daemon dev-python/lockfile dev-python/chardet

To install pip on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install pip

To install the modules:

sudo pip install python-daemon lockfile pyinotify chardet

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

sudo pip install python-daemon-3K lockfile pyinotify chardet

Configuration

See the provided watcher.conf file for an example job configuration. The config file should reside in /etc/watcher.conf or ~/.watcher.conf. 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

Autostart Watcher on system startup

There is some init startup scripts in repo (gentoo, debian and systemd unit). Use your init system manual to install them properly.

For debian:

cp init.watcher.debian /etc/init.d/watcher
update-rc.d watcher defaults
/etc/init.d/watcher start

For gentoo:

cp init.watcher.gentoo /etc/init.d/watcher
rc-update add watcher default
/etc/init.d/watcher start

For systemd:

cp init.watcher.unit /etc/systemd/system/watcher.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable watcher
systemctl start watcher