)- arval

Arval creates a mirror of the file structure of any directory, and keeps both in sync. The mirrored files are dummy lightweight files, allowing you to more quickly remove, rename and reorganze them.

Rationale

I have a directory holding a fair amount of very large pictures. I need to reorganize the file structure and rename a bunch of files there. For that, I need to know what each file represents, but because the images are very large and heavy, opening them in a viewer takes forever.

I build Arval to help me with this situation. Arval creates a directory that mirrors the file structure of my original directory, with the exact same number of files, with the exact same name. But this files are thumbnails of the original ones. This allow me to more quickly navigate in my file structure, move things around and rename files. Once I'm done, I just need to run Arval again so my changes are synchronized with the source directory.

Installation

We recommend installing arval globally.

yarn add --global arval

Warning

Because Arval is meant to rename, remove and move files around, you need to use it with caution. Any misconfiguration or bug in the code could result in data loss of your source folder.

We highly recommend you create a backup of your source folder before you use Arval.

Usage

You need to create a arvalrc.json file in the directory where arval will be used.

{
  "source": "./src",
  "mirror": "./mirror",
  "resize": 800
}

Key	Default value	Description
source	N/A	Path to the source folder, relative to the arvalrc.json file
mirror	N/A	Path to the mirror folder, relative to the arvalrc.json file. Will be created if needed
resize	800	Max dimension images will be resized to

Then, you can run arval

$ arval

What it does

Arval will create a copy of your source directory structure into the mirror directory, but all files will be replaced with dummy lightweight files (or in the case of images with thumbnails) keeping the same name and structure.

You can reorganize the mirror as you want. Delete files, move them around, rename them. Once you're done, run arval again. All you changes in the mirror will be synchronized back the original source folder.