CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosbashsynchronizationrsync
olive
olive

Reputation: 1204

Script to automatically sync on directory/file modification in between Mac OSX machine and Linux machine

I have some source code on my Mac, and in order to test I'm interested in synchronizing it with a VM containing a similar web server setup to the production environment. Therefore I need to be able to automatically copy files over to the VM every time there are changes.

I know I can use rsync to do this manually whenever a script is run but I need some way of getting it to run in the background every single time a file in a particular directory or one of its sub-directories is modified.

I know inotifywait exists on Linux machines and could solve this problem. I've also read about the FSEvents API and kqueue. However, none of these seem to be accessible from the command line and I really don't want to spend a long time making something to do this...

I guess I could use a cronjob but a minute is a pretty long time to wait to see changes on a website...

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2690

Answers (3)

Ned Deily
Ned Deily

Reputation: 85035

You might be able to set up a launchd agent to do what you want for a simple setup. See this question and the man page for launchd.plist for more information about the launchd WatchPath key. But it looks like WatchPath may not work for changes within sub-directories.

Upvotes: 0

Alex Howansky
Alex Howansky

Reputation: 53533

I do this all the time, developing on a Windows/Linux/Mac workstation, and saving changes to a remote Linux server where they're immediately served back to my workstation's browser for testing. You've got a couple options:

  1. You could mount the remote files locally (like via sshfs) and make changes directly to them. I.e., your Mac thinks the files are local, so you can edit them with your GUI editor, but when you File->Save, it actually saves the file remotely. The main downside to this is that you can't work when disconnected from the server.

  2. Mount the local files remotely. This would allow you to work locally while disconnected but won't allow the test site to work when disconnected -- which may not be a big deal. This option might not be doable if you don't have the right tools/access on the remote server.

  3. (My preference.) Use NetBeans IDE, which has a very nice "copy to remote" feature. You maintain a full copy of all files locally, and edit them directly. When you hit File->Save on a file, NetBeans will save it locally and transparently scp/ftp it to your remote server.

Upvotes: 1

DigitalRoss
DigitalRoss

Reputation: 146053

How about using a DVCS like git or mercurial, and having the local repo run post-commit hooks to run the rsync and then the test itself?

I'm a bit confused about why you can't just run rsync from the same script that runs the test. If you run rsync -e ssh you can set up automatic public key authentication between the VM and the Mac. There won't be anything manual about the rsync in that case.

Upvotes: 0

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