Cuco

Cuco watches files in a directory and take an action when they change.

Cuco is controlled by a user-supplied script file. Intermixed "watch" commands specify what to do for the particular modified files.

Cuco is:

Simple to use
Highly flexible
Evented ( uses gem listen )
Portable ( Ruby )

Most importantly it is agnostic to:

Test frameworks
Web frameworks

Installation

$ gem install cuco

Usage

$ cuco          # default script file is .watchr
 Or
$ cuco path/to/script/file

will monitor files in the current directory tree and react to events on those files in accordance with the script.

A simple example of a script file

This sample script is intended for testing purposes with Minitest. md is the match-data (see Ruby regular expressions).

watch( 'test/.*_test\.rb$' ) { |md| run_it(md[0]) }
watch( 'lib/(.*)\.rb$' )     { |md| run_it("test/#{md[1]}_test.rb") }

def run_it(file)
  system %(bundle exec ruby -I test #{file})
end

Signal.trap("QUIT") { system("bundle exec rake") } # Ctrl-\ or ctrl-4
Signal.trap("INT")  { abort("Interrupted\n") }     # Ctrl-C

Script

Scripts are pure Ruby.

Intermixed are "watch" rules that match observed files to an action. The matching is achieved by a pattern (a regular expression) parameter. The action is specified by a block (see above sample).

Updates to script files are picked up on the fly (no need to restart cuco) so experimenting is painless.

It's easy to see why cuco is so flexible, since the whole command is custom. The above actions could just as easily call "jruby", "ruby --rubygems", "ruby -I lib", etc. or any combination of these.

See directory scripts for samples.

Miscellaneous

Cuco is heavily inspired by:

gem watchr
gem observr (a follow-up of gem watchr)