Watch Lion

A simple shell utility to monitor file system events on Mac OS X 10.7+ (Lion or newer).

Shell Utilities

Watch Lion comes with a utility script called watchlion. Please type watchlion --help at the shell prompt to know more about this tool.

watchlion can read .watchlion.yml files and execute command within them in response to file system events. The .watchlion.yml file will be monitored and loading when it has been updated.

An example .watchlion.yml file:

build:
  coffee: make js
  haml:   make html
  py:     make test
  sass:   make css
loglevel: info

An example Makefile file:

.SUFFIXES: .coffee .js
.coffee.js:
      coffee -b -c $<
.SUFFIXES: .js .min.js
.js.min.js:
      uglifyjs -nc -o $@ $<
COFFEE = $(wildcard *.coffee)
JS = $(COFFEE:.coffee=.js)
MINJS = $(JS:.js=.min.js)

.SUFFIXES: .haml .html
.haml.html:
      haml -f html5 -t ugly $< $@
HAML = $(wildcard *.haml)
HTML = $(HAML:.haml=.html)

.SUFFIXES: .sass .css
.sass.css:
      compass compile $< -c config.rb
.SUFFIXES: .sass .min.css
.sass.min.css:
      compass compile --environment production $< -c config.rb
      mv $*.css $@
SASS = $(wildcard *.sass)
CSS = $(SASS:.sass=.css)
MINCSS = $(SASS:.sass=.min.css)

css: $(MINCSS) $(CSS)
html: $(HTML)
js: $(JS) $(MINJS)
test:
      py.test

Then run watchlion command:

$ watchlion
INFO:root:load_config: loading .watchlion.yml
...

Will start building js files when you update a coffee file:

...
INFO:root:make js
coffee -b -c main.coffee
uglifyjs -nc -o main.min.js main.js
...

You can use control-C to stop watchlion .

Installation

Installing from PyPI using pip:

pip install watchlion

Installing from PyPI using easy_install:

easy_install watchlion

Installing from source:

python setup.py install

Installation Caveats

The watchlion script depends on PyYAML which links with LibYAML, which brings a performance boost to the PyYAML parser. However, installing LibYAML is optional but recommended. On Mac OS X, you can use homebrew to install LibYAML:

brew install libyaml

Supported Platforms

• Mac OS X 10.7+ (require FSEvents)

Dependencies

1. Python 2.6 or above.
2. XCode
3. PyYAML

Licensing

Watch Lion is licensed under the terms of the MIT.

Copyright 2012 ENDOH takanao.

Project source code is available at Github. Please report bugs and file enhancement requests at the issue tracker.