Why another file watcher for OS X?

There's already kicker, and many ruby programs that need file watching, already have solutions built in. For example ZenTest, compass etc..

The problem with file watchers on OS X is that they depend on rubycocoa. If rubycocoa isn't available most of them fallback to file-system polling, which kills my cpu. If you're using the system ruby that comes with OS X, you're fine because rubycocoa is already built in.

I use rvm, which makes it super easy for me to install multiple separate and self-contained versions of ruby. I could for instance, maintain an old project that was written against ruby-1.8.6 while on the same machine starting a new project using ruby-1.9.2.

You'll only run into rubycocoa problems if you use rvm. Have a quick google for rvm and rubycocoa, and you'll see a huge list of people having issues installing rubycocoa with rvm.

Typically the code to fix this problem goes something like this

Eventually, I got tired of having to install rubycocoa just to use osx's fsevents. I discovered ruby-fsevent when I went looking for solutions to this problem. It's a file watcher gem with a C extension that uses fsevents. For me this means I don't have to fuss with recompiling my ruby version and and making rvm and rubycocoa happy to get fsevents.

However, there still was a problem. Compass doesn't use ruby-fsevent. I needed a file watcher that uses ruby-fsevent and does not depend on rubycocoa, and can execute arbitrary commands. I wanted a tool that I could use like below.

puncher 'command' files_in_dir/*

And that's what I built. It's incredibly simple. The code is only 29 lines.

Today I mostly use it like below

screen -S compass_punch puncher 'bundle exec compass -c config/compass.rb' app/sass/*

This creates a screen, which runs a puncher instance, that runs a compass command to compile all my sass code, whenever a sass file is modified. Even though compass requires rubycocoa for using fsevents, I can wrap it with my puncher gem and use fsevents without rubycocoa.

I wrap it in a screen so I can check on the output occasionally. My next enhancement is to add growl notifications to puncher, then I can simply background the process, instead of spawning a screen for it. Problem solved.

PS if you have any interest in seeing a version of puncher that works on linux or windows, send me a message, comment, or create an issue on the github issue tracker.

UPDATE: I heartily recommend guard for general purpose file watching