Watcher is a daemon that watches specified files/folders for changes and fires commands in response to those changes. It is similar to incron, however, configuration uses a simpler to read ini file instead of a plain text file. Unlike incron it can also recursively monitor directories.
It's written in Python, making it easier to hack.
This fork is updated for Python 3 to run on Ubuntu 22.04 and similar. Watcher uses the pyinotify library.
In Ubuntu (and Debian) you can install it with:
sudo apt-get install python3-pyinotify
See the provided watcher.ini file for an example job configuration. The
config file should reside in /etc/watcher.ini or ~/.watcher.ini. You
can also specify the path to the config file as a command line parameter
using the --config option.
If you edit the ini file you must restart the daemon for it to reload the configuration.
Make sure watcher.py is marked as executable:
chmod +x watcher.py
Start the daemon with:
./watcher.py start
Stop it with:
./watcher.py stop
Restart it with:
./watcher.py restart
Debug it with: (log output to console)
./watcher.py debug
If you don't want the daemon to fork to the background, start it with
./watcher.py debug