Rerun if changed

Wojciech Adam Koszek super duper process restarter

rerun-if-changed starts the application and moniors the source code files in parallel. It uses a standard shell commands, requires no extensions or complex dependencies. It's designed to be simple to install and simple to run. Competitive tools might be smarter, faster and more effecient, but this tool will likely give you less headpain.

If the source code files change, rerun-if-changed restarts the application. This script was created for technologies such as Golang, Node.js or Ruby Sinatra framework.

In the cases supported right now, the application which is started runs in the foreground. If your application spins and goes into the background, you must ask it not to do so.

Quickstart

Assuming your app is in app.rb, and you'd normally run it as:

ruby app.rb

you run rerun-if-changed as:

./rerun-if-changed 'ruby app.rb' '*.rb'

It means that rerun-if-changed will run ruby app and monitor all .rb files. If any of them change, rerun-if-changed will send a SIGTERM to ruby app already spun and wait a little wait for it to finish. Afterwards, it'll start ruby app again.

As opposed to *.rb you can pass anything you'd usually pass to ls. This tool uses ls internally, in fact.

Author

• Wojciech Adam Koszek, wojciech@koszek.com
• http://www.koszek.com