icemac.callonchange 0.8

Changelog

Requirements

• Mac OS X 10.5+ (Leopard)

• Python 2.7

General usage

Usage: callonchange [options] path utility [utility arguments]

callonchange invokes utility with its utility arguments when path or something in it changes.

Options:

--version

show program’s version number and exit

-h, --help

show this help message and exit

-e EXTENSION

only call utility on changes of a file with this extension (option might be used multiple times)

-i

Run utility immediately after callonchange has been started. (By default the utility is only run when something changed.)

-q

Do not display any output of callonchange. (Still displays the output of the utility.)

EXTENSION might be specified with or without a leading dot:

-e .py is equal to -e py is equal to -epy

Caution: optional arguments must be specified before the positional arguments (path and utility). Arguments specified after the positional arguments are taken as arguments of the utility.

Usage as script

$ python setup.py install

$ callonchange -e log /var/log xeyes

In buildout

There is a recipe in the package which eases installation using buildout.

[coc]
recipe = icemac.callonchange

'-i', '-e', 'py', '-e', 'zcml', '-e', 'pt', '-e', 'txt', 'src', 'bin/test', '-cv'

[coc]
recipe = icemac.callonchange
name = coc
arguments = 'Products', 'bin/ztest'

$ bin/callonchange -t testObserver

Stopping callonchange

To stop a running callonchange instance hit ^C (Control-C).

Thanks

Thanks to Malte Borch for the great MacFSEvents which icemac.callonchange is based on.

Similar tools

(Sorted by the time I got to know them.)

• pest: “Auto tester for python” Seems to be designed to run tests and nothing else. Has growl integration. Current version (1.0.3) has no automatic tests.

• sniffer: “An automatic test runner. Supports nose out of the box.” Supports Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Current version (0.2.2) has no automatic tests.

• autonose: “continuous test tracker / runner for nosetests” Seems to focus on nose tests. Version 0.2 only acts on changes of python files.

• PyZen: “Continuous testing for paranoid developers.” Seems to be tightly integrated into python’s unittest framework and Django. Detects file changes using comparison of file modification time stamps. So it is slow on larger code bases. Version 0.1 has no automatic tests.

• Flask-Zen: “Flask-Script commands to integrate with PyZen.” Light layer around PyZen to integrate it into Flask. Version 0.1 has no automatic tests.

• nosier: “Monitors paths and upon detecting changes runs the specified command” It is however limited to Linux 2.6 since it depends on the inotify facility. Uses black lists and white lists for files thos changes sould be tracked and has some other nice features. Version 1.1 has no automatic tests.

• supcut: “Simple unobtrusive Python continuous unit testing” It is limited to Linux as it depends on inotify. Expects some of its template files are installed in /usr/share/doc/python-supcut/examples. Although it always talks about running nose tests, it might be used for arbitrary calls, too. Can send e-mails about test run. Version 0.5.1 has no automatic tests.

• rerun: “Command-line executable Python script to re-run the given command every time files are modified in the current directory or its subdirectories.” Runs OS independent but polls the change times of files. Version 1.0.16 has no automatic tests.

Ideas

• It would be nice to have predefined argument lines (profiles) even when not using buildout. They could be stored in the home directory of the user. (Should support profiles which reverence other profiles.)

• In buildout recipe: default script name should be section name.

• A minimal time between calls (delay) might be nice, so a change does not result in a call of the utility when it occurred during the delay time.

• The options of callonchange should have long variants, too.

• White list/black list approach of nosier seems to be nice.

• When observing large trees for changes of files with a specific extension, starting up the script can take while as the whole tree has to to be scanned once. During this start up period changes are not yet handled, so a message would be nice when start up is done.

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog could be a way to get callonchange running on Linux and Windows, too.

Hacking

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/icemac/icemac.callonchange

Running Tests

(Currently not running successfully on Travis-CI until Mac OS X gets supported there.)

To run the tests of icemac.callonchange call:

$ python setup.py test

or use zc.buildout:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout
$ bin/test

or use callonchange itself:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout
$ bin/callonchange

In the last version you have to change something inside the src directory of the package so the observer lets the tests run.