sentinel

This program, when configured correctly, will watch your source files and run them through other programs when they are modified. It was intended for LESS and JavaScript files although can be set up to run anything you want. sentinel is built to run on node.js.

At the moment the only way to stop it is with Ctrl + C. I am planning on implementing some kind of interface so that you can prompt things like reloading the config, or forcing the processing of a file. I would also like to add regular expression file matching.

Installation

You can either download this repository or use npm. I strongly recommend npm. To install it simply type:

sudo npm install sentinel -g

That's it. Done.

Configuration

Like make, sentinel looks in your current directory for a config file. This file should be named sentinel.json. It will also look for a global config in your home directory called .sentinel.json. The local one in your current folder will overwrite things set in the global one via inheritance.

As you can tell from the name, the configuration is written in JSON, lets have a look at a very basic one that runs a JavaScript file through JSHint.

{
    "files": [
        {
            "path": "assets/javascript/main.js",
            "processor": "jshint"
        }
    ],
    "processors": {
        "jshint": "jshint {{path}}"
    }
}

Lets walk through this. We have a fairly simple JSON object containing two top level properties, files and processors. Files is an array of objects that contain data about your source files. Each of the files values are actually arguments, this is because they replace their associated value in the processor string. So if you write {{path}} in your processor it will be replaced with the path value. The processor value can either be a string or an array of strings, these let sentinel know what processor you wish to run the file through.

The processors object is a list of key value pairs containing the name of the processor and a small bash script to run your script to. You can utilise any passed values in a file object by simply wrapping the name of the value in double curly braces ({{value name}}). So you can use the path value as an input and output as the destination.

If you wanted to, you could copy this (less the files array) into ~/.sentinel.json and have the JSHint processor available in every project.

Running sentinel

To run sentinel simply navigate your terminal to the directory containing your configuration and run sentinel. It will read your global config file first and then the one inside the directory. It will watch your files for changes and run them through their processors when it needs to.

There are a few command line arguments you can use too.

• --verbose / -v: Show verbose output, so information will be logged to the console when files change for example.
• --process file / -p file: Does not watch any files but instantly processes the file you specify, just like make. The file name must match one in the config exactly.

Example configurations

Simply drop these into the processors section of your global config. You can find it in ~/.sentinel.json. Here is a template you can use.

{
    "processors": {
        
    }
}

Remember to add commas after each processor! Please make sure you are using valid JSON. If something is not working, run with the -v parameter to see information regarding errors. The following lines use external packages installed via npm.

• "less": "lessc {{path}} -x -o {{output}}"
• "jshint": "jshint {{path}}"
• "uglifyjs": "uglifyjs -o {{output}} {{path}}"

Licence

sentinel - Watch source files for changes and processes them accordingly

Copyright (C) 2011 Oliver Caldwell

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licences/gpl.html.

Author

Written by Oliver Caldwell.