watch.md

Watch Your Media Folder

Introduction

Starting from v2.1.0, Koel provides a mean to help watch your media directory and trigger selective synchronization every time there's a change to it. With this you don't have to run a whole time-consuming koel:sync process for just one added song. The actual watching is done by inotifywait, a popular filesystem watcher for Linux – sorry Mac and Windows folks.

Though, in theory, you can watch _any_ directory other than or outside of your media root, it's not recommended, as the next manual `php artisan koel:sync` call will simply remove all those "invalid" entries.

Installation

In order to start using the feature, follow these steps:

1. Install inotify Tools

On CentOS for example, you can run this shell command:

sudo yum --enablerepo=epel -y install inotify-tools

2. Set Up a Watcher Script

Now you need to set up a watcher script to run inotifywait and send the output to koel:sync artisan command. For example, you can create a sample watch file in Koel's root directory with this content:

#!/bin/bash

MEDIA_PATH=/var/www/media/
PHP_BIN=/usr/bin/php

inotifywait -rme move,close_write,delete --format "%e %w%f" $MEDIA_PATH | while read file; do
  $PHP_BIN artisan koel:sync "${file}"
done

3. Run the Watcher in the Background

Following the above example:

$ chmod +x watch
$ ./watch
[Ctrl+z]
$ bg
$ disown -h

4. Verify

You can now verify that it works by tail -f storage/logs/laravel.log while doing changes to your media directory.