cynch

Cynch

Asynchronous synchronization in a cinch. Multi-target file uploading with rsync!

Note: Cynch takes advantage of several ES6 features (classes, arrow functions, etc). You may need to run Node with Harmony flags (or upgrade to a newer version).

What is this?

Certain IDEs (I won't name any) have pretty lame remote development support, especially if you have a need to sync with multiple remote environments. Cynch fixes that. Just specify your source and target(s) and you're ready to go.

Installation

npm install -g cynch

Usage

cynch /path/to/my/config.json

If no config file is provided, Cynch will look for cynch.json in the current working directory.

Configuration

The following are possible configuration values.

Name	Required?	Type	Description
source	x	string	Source directory to sync. May be relative to the configuration path.
targets	x	string[]	Target objects (see below)
exclusions		string[]	Patterns to exclude from the sync (equivalent to passing --exclude options to rsync)
inclusions		string[]	Patterns to include in the sync (equivalent to passing --include options to rsync)
rsyncOptions		string[]	Any additional options to pass to rsync
watch		boolean	Enable watch mode, watch for file changes and trigger sync
watchOptions		object	Watcher Options, See Chokidar
watchOptions.waitTimeout		int	Number of milliseconds to wait for all file change events to finish (default: 300)
watchOptions.path		string	Path to watch for changes (default: source from config file)
debug		boolean	Debug mode
growl		boolean	Allow Growl Notifications (default: true)

Target objects

Tip: rsync uses your machine's ssh config; you may substitute full user@host strings with an entry from your ssh config. (e.g.: "host": "mybox")

{
  "host": "[e-mail]",
  "path": "/some/example/deployment/path"
}

Example config

{
  "source": "~/src/myProject",
  "targets": [
    {
      "host": "pinky",
      "path": "/srv/myProject"
    },
    {
      "host": "jewel",
      "path": "/srv/myProject"
    },
    {
      "host": "arvinne",
      "path": "/srv/myProject"
    }
  ],
  "exclusions": [
    ".git",
    ".idea",
    "node_modules/*"
  ]
}

Watch Mode

If watch mode is enabled, Cynch will function as a long-running process that watches for file changes and synchronizes accordingly (as opposed to exiting immediately once the sync is complete). This can be used with any daemon tool (i.e. launchd, systemd) to ease deployment.

By default, your source directory is watched. If this is not preferable, you may specify the watch directory via watchOptions.path.

Growl Notifications

With growl notifications, you can not get notified when Cynch succesffully uploads or errors out. In order for notifications to work you will need to install a notifier library.

Mac OSX (Darwin)

Install growlnotify(1). On OS X 10.8, Notification Center is supported using terminal-notifier. To install:

  $ sudo gem install terminal-notifier

Ubuntu (Linux)

Install notify-send through the libnotify-bin package:

  $ sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

Windows

Download and install Growl for Windows

Download growlnotify - IMPORTANT : Unpack growlnotify to a folder that is present in your path!

Special Considerations

Windows

Cynch can be used on Windows using rsync from Cygwin, however there are some special requirements.

• Cygwin's rsync does not seem to like Windows-style paths (e.g. c:\src\myProject); attempting to use them will result in error messages from rsync such as The source and destination cannot both be remote. To fix this, use Cygwin-style paths (e.g. /cygdrive/c/src/myProject). HOWEVER...
• The file watcher does not like Cygwin-style paths. Therefore, the watchOptions.path config option must be set to the respective Windows-style path (e.g. c:\src\myProject).

##License ISC