watch Command
There are some specific commands that make use of the Watcher library in CommandBox such as
testbox watch and coldbox watch-reinit. However, there is also a generic watch command that will run any arbitrary command of your choosing when a path matching your file globbing pattern is added/updated/deleted.1
watch *.json "echo 'config file updated!'"
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The following environment variables will be available to your command
- watcher_added - A JSON array of relative paths added in the watch directory
- watcher_removed - A JSON array of relative paths removed in the watch directory
- watcher_changed - A JSON array of relative paths changed in the watch directory
Since escaping meta characters can get tricky with nested strings, you can declare the command as an environment variable and then just reference it like so:
1
set command = "echo 'You added \${item}!'"
2
watch command="foreach '\${watcher_added}' \${command}" --verbose
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That example runs the
foreach command over each item in the watcher_added array and then runs an echo statement to output the name of each added path.Note that the "paths" here work more like
.gitignore entries and less like bash paths. Specifically:- A path with a leading slash (or backslash), will be evaluated relative to the current working directory. E.g.
watch /foowill only watch files in the directory at./foo, but not in directories like./bar/foo. - A path without a leading slash (or backslash) will be applied as a glob filter to all files within the current working directory. E.g.
watch foowill result in the entire working directory being watched, but only files matching the glob**foowill be processed.
If your watcher seems slow, unresponsive, or is failing to notice some file change events, it is likely that you have it watching too many files. Try specifying more specific paths to the files you want to process, and use leading slashes in your arguments to avoid watching all files in the current working directory.
Parameters
paths- Comma-delimited list of file globbing paths to watch relative to the working directory, defaults to **excludePaths- Comma-delimited list of file globbing paths to exclude relative to the working directory.command- The command to run when the watcher firesdelay- How may milliseconds to wait before polling for changes, defaults to 500 msdirectory- Working directory to start watcher inverbose- Output details about the files that changed
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