watchgod 0.0.1

Usage

To watch for changes in a directory:

from watchgod import watch

for changes in watch('./path/to/dir'):
    print(changes)

To run a function and restart it when code changes:

from watchgod import run_process

def foobar(a, b, c):
    ...

run_process('./path/to/dir', foobar, process_args=(1, 2, 3))

run_process uses PythonWatcher so only changes to python files will prompt a reload, see custom watchers below.

If you need notifications about change events as well as to restart a process you can use the callback argument to pass a function will will be called on every file change with one argument: the set of file changes.

import asyncio
from watchgod import awatch

async def main():
    async for changes in awatch('/path/to/dir'):
        print(changes)

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())

import asyncio
from watchgod import arun_process

def foobar(a, b, c):
    ...

async def main():
    await arun_process('./path/to/dir', foobar, process_args=(1, 2, 3))

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())

Why no inotify / kqueue / fsevent / winapi support

watchgod (for now) uses file polling rather than the OS’s built in file change notifications.

This is not an oversight, it’s a decision with the following rationale:

1. Polling is “fast enough”, particularly since PEP 471 introduced fast scandir.

   With a reasonably large project like the TutorCruncher code base with 850 files and 300k lines of code watchdog can scan the entire tree in ~24ms. With a scan interval of 400ms that’s roughly 5% of one CPU - perfectly acceptable load during development.

2. The clue is in the title, there are at least 4 different file notification systems to integrate with, most of them not trivial. And that’s before we get to changes between different OS versions.

3. Polling works well when you want to group or “debounce” changes.

   Let’s say you’re running a dev server and you change branch in git, 100 files change. Do you want to reload the dev server 100 times or once? Right.

   Polling periodically will likely group these changes into one event. If you’re receiving a stream of events you need to delay execution of the reload when you receive the first event to see if it’s part of a whole bunch of file changes, this is not completely trivial.

All that said, I might still implement inotify support. I don’t use anything other than Linux so I definitely won’t be working on dedicated support for any other OS.