fswatch is a great way to monitor for local file system changes, and then act upon them. This is similar to my “FMDMS” utility that I had made a while back.
Use case:
I develop locally, but sometimes I want to see those changes on a remote test server as I work. I keep a sync.bash script in each project that I want to test on a remote server. When I’m ready, I execute sync.bash locally.
Example:
In prior articles, I made extensive use of Docker for local development and remote deployment. When I’m working on a project that will run via Docker Compose, I place everything inside of /srv/ on the remote side, and can expect to see the same results on a remote system that I do on my development machine. From there, I can extend Docker Compose with multiple files (includes have been registered as a GitHub issue), and to differentiate between my Development and Production environments.
You could also add --delete-excluded as an argument to rsync, but when I’m working with systems where a database might exist in both locations, I want to exclude the file(s), but not delete them on the remote side.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
shopt -s expand_aliases
# Determine core paths
################################################################################
SOURCE="${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" # Dave Dopson, Thank You! - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-tell-what-directory-its-stored-in
while [ -h "$SOURCE" ]; do # resolve $SOURCE until the file is no longer a symlink
SCRIPTPATH="$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" && pwd )"
SOURCE="$(readlink "$SOURCE")"
[[ $SOURCE != /* ]] && SOURCE="$SCRIPTPATH/$SOURCE" # if $SOURCE was a relative symlink, we need to resolve it relative to the path where the symlink file was located
done
################################################################################
SCRIPTPATH="$( cd -P "$( dirname "$SOURCE" )" && pwd )"
SCRIPTNAME=`basename "$SOURCE"`
################################################################################
fsSrc="${SCRIPTPATH}/"
fsDest='USER@SERVER:~/srv/'
alias run_rsync="rsync \
--progress \
--partial \
--archive \
--verbose \
--compress \
--delete \
--keep-dirlinks \
--rsh=/usr/bin/ssh \
\
--exclude 'sync.bash' \
--exclude '.*/' \
--exclude '.*' \
--exclude 'tmp/' \
--exclude 'ignore/' \
\
'${fsSrc}' \
'${fsDest}' \
"
# Thanks: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34575374/how-to-use-fswatch-and-rsync-to-automatically-sync-directories
run_rsync; fswatch \
--print0 \
--one-per-batch \
--recursive \
"${fsSrc}" | while read -d "" event; do run_rsync; done
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