proximity

Proximity

Proximity is a tiny program that executes a command when a file is changed somewhere under the current directory. It's useful for performing automatic tasks such as a build when files change.

Installation

Proximity requires node.js and npm. Once you have these dependencies, simply:

npm install proximity -g

Usage

  Usage: proximity [options] <command>

  Options:

    -h, --help               output usage information
    --exitonerror            Exit if the spawned command exits with an error code.
    -x, --exclude <pattern>  Specify a string or regular expression which if matched, will ignore the change. You can specify multiple patterns to exclude by repeating this option.
    -t, --timeout            Specify a timeout (in milliseconds) for the spawned process. Default: none
    -q, --quiet              Supress command output.
    -v, --verbose            Output verbose information.

For example, the following command will run ./build.sh && ps aux | grep node whenever a file under the directory where you executed proximity changes:

	proximity "./build.sh && ps aux | grep node"

You can also cause proximity to exit if the command it runs has an error (by default, proximity will ignore errors in the command it is set to execute):

    proximity "false" --exitonerror

You can exclude files and patterns you don't want to trigger the command (patterns are treated as regulard expressions):

    proximity "./build.sh" -x node_modules -x components -x "/\.json$/i"

You can specify a timeout (in milliseconds) after which proximity will stop the command (maybe your build process sometimes hangs? You could kill it after 10 seconds.):

    proximity "./build.sh" -t 10000

You can suppress the output of the command if you'd prefer not to clutter up your terminal:

    proximity "./build.sh" -q

Having problems? Enable verbose output to get a better idea of what proximity is doing:

    proximity "./build.sh" -v

NOTES

You may see errors like:

(node) warning: possible EventEmitter memory leak detected. 11 listeners added. Use emitter.setMaxListeners() to increase limit.
Trace
    at EventEmitter.addListener (events.js:160:15)
    at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/proximity/node_modules/fs-watch-tree/lib/tree-watcher.js:74:21
    at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/proximity/node_modules/fs-watch-tree/lib/async.js:15:21
    at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/proximity/node_modules/fs-watch-tree/lib/fs-filtered.js:23:9
    at Object.oncomplete (fs.js:107:15)

These are not a problem. fs-watch-tree has accepted a pull request that should resolve this soon: https://github.com/busterjs/fs-watch-tree/pull/5

TODO

• Check compatability on other systems (only tested on Mac OS X Lion).