jonsnow

jonsnow is a tool to help improve development workflows for people with lots of unit tests and too little patience to run them. I developed it for my own use case (namely, testing Ansible playbooks), but it should be useful to others as well.

It works by checking to see if the contents of a directory have changed, and runs an arbitrary shell command if they have. This is similar behavior to, for example, development mode in Django or certain Node.JS deployment systems, but simplified and generalized for use in any development environment.

My workflow usually looks like this (I use tmux):

+----------------------------+---------+
|                            |         |
|                            |         |
|             Vim            | jonsnow |
|                            |         |
|                            |         |
|                            |         |
+----------------------------+---------+

This way, any time I save a file in Vim, the results are immediately reflected on my secondary terminal window, which allows me to continue working without needing to run my deployment process manually.

To learn how to use jonsnow, just run jonsnow --help. It should be pretty self explanatory. note that anything after the flag arguments is considered your command, so you should always order as jonsnow <flags> <command>.

Installing

Available on pip! Just run pip install jonsnow the way you would install any other python-based executable.

Name

There was a lame pun about being a "watcher" in here at some point, but that's all I've got.