Guard 2.10.3 exits when Guardfile is changed

Problem: Guard no longer reevaluates files

Option 1: Nice/Better/Recommended Workaround (for projects)

Just like you create binstubs, you can have a bin/guard file that reloads automatically.

Just download this gist as bin/guard.

Option 2: The Quick-And-Dirty Workaround

Run Guard with this shell one-liner:

while bundle exec guard; echo "Restarting guard..."; do echo; done

And now, every time you change the file, Guard exits and gets restarted by the shell script. The extra echo in the while condition is needed as otherwise Guard exits with a non-zero status, breaking the loop.

Note: Ctrl-D will no longer close Guard. You can use Ctrl-C to exit Guard.

100% bullet proof, as opposed to how reevaluating was implemented up till now.

Problems

If guard isn't responding to changes to your Guardfile - you may need to move you Guardfile to another directory, and symlink it.

Why so?

Since the MacOS driver pretty much can watch only recursively, you can either:

1. watch everything
2. or watch given directories (and their contents, recursively), but without the top directory

Since option 1 is bad for big projects, the solution is using the directories statement. But if you can't then watch the top directory, you can't watch the Guardfile, the Gemfile, etc.

So the solution to this new problem (can't use directories and watch Guardfile at the same time), is to put Guardfile in a subdir (e.g. config), watch that directory, and symlink it back.

For more info see: Optimizing for large projects

Background

Supporting the feature was a maintenance nightmare (kind of like implementing fork() in pure Ruby in an app that heavily relies on global state - and there was always something broken).

So sorry for removing this feature - it kept the project from making any progress and we decided that with the above workarounds, it wasn't a show-stopper. But the gain was massive...