chicken-little

WIP: do things when files change on the filesystem (re-run your test suite, for example)

Example usage:

./node_modules/.bin/chicken -c "filesystem had changes" .

To re-run your test suite when any files change (timing how long it takes):

./node_modules/.bin/chicken -c "time npm test" .

Why? Aren't there already others?

My main use case is to re-exec my mocha test suite(s) on file changes.

I want my test suite to re-run on any changes, including templates, CSS, and client-side javascript.

If you don't like chicken-little, there are others that might work better for you:

• nodemon
  • doesn't easily trigger on non-js/coffeescript files
  • stopped working for me
  • no tests at all
• mocha testrunner
  • doesn't take mongoose model changes into account when it re-runs
• node-dev
  • only works for node scripts, cannot exec random shell commands ('make test')
  • doesn't trigger on all file changes
• supervisor
  • I like being able to npm install everything my app development depends on
  • relatively complex

I probably missed some, but it's a start.