sidekick

h1. Sidekick

"Sidekick":http://ibuildlegobricks.tumblr.com/post/1398895151/automate-common-tasks-with-sidekick is a command line tool to automatically trigger actions on certain events, as defined per project, in a local @.sidekick@ file in your project folder:

watch('**/*.rb') { restart_passenger; rake 'docs' }

auto_compile 'assets/*.sass', 'public/:name.css'

every(10) { notify sh 'fortune' }

h3. Sample use cases

• Restart server when code is changed
• Auto-compile Sass or CoffeeScript templates (and many other languages)
• Periodically run tasks
• Continuous testing, notifications, hooks, you name it

h3. Features

• Simple and powerful DSL
• Easy to extend
• Compiles many formats, thanks to "Tilt":http://github.com/rtomayko/tilt.
• Powered by "EventMachine":http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine
• Very brief and concise codebase.

You can "read the annotated source code":http://jbe.github.com/sidekick/sidekick.html.

h2. Basic usage

Install with @gem install sidekick@ and invoke the @sidekick@ command in your project folder. If you do not have a @.sidekick@ file, you will be offered a "template":http://github.com/jbe/sidekick/blob/master/lib/template with plenty of examples.

h2. Defining new triggers

Have a look at the "existing triggers":http://jbe.github.com/sidekick/triggers.html, and you will get the idea. Basically, you define new triggers by writing methods that hook into "EventMachine":http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine the same way as in @EM.run { .. }@.

If you write some useful extensions, please ask me to merge them into the main repository.

h3. Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010 Jostein Berre Eliassen. See LICENSE for details.