Watcher is a daemon that watches specified files/folders for changes and fires commands in response to those changes. It is similar to incron, however, configuration uses a simpler to read ini file instead of a plain text file. Unlike incron it can also recursively monitor directories.

It's written in Python, making it easier to hack.

You need Python 2.7 and the pyinotify library.

In Ubuntu (and Debian) you can install these with:

sudo apt-get install python python-pyinotify

See the provided watcher.ini file for an example job configuration. The config file should reside in /etc/watcher.ini or ~/.watcher.ini. You can also specify the path to the config file as a command line parameter using the --config option.

If you edit the ini file you must restart the daemon for it to reload the configuration.

Make sure watcher.py is marked as executable:

chmod +x watcher.py

Start the daemon with:

./watcher.py start

Stop it with:

./watcher.py stop

Restart it with:

./watcher.py restart

If you don't want the daemon to fork to the background, start it with

./watcher.py debug