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entr: rerun your build when files change
This is going to be a pretty quick post – I found out about entr relatively recently and I felt like WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS BEFORE?!?! So I’m telling you about it in case you’re in the same boat as I was.
There’s a great explanation of the tool with lots of examples on entr’s website.
The summary is in the headline: entr is a command line tool that lets you run a arbitrary command every time you change any of a set of specified files. You pass it the list of files to watch on stdin, like this:
git ls-files | entr bash my-build-script.sh
or
find . -name *.rs | entr cargo test
or whatever you want really.
quick feedback is amazing
Like possibly every single programmer in the universe, I find it Very Annoying to have to manually rerun my build / tests every time I make a change to my code.
A lot of tools (like hugo and flask) have a built in system to automatically rebuild when you change your files, which is great!
But often I have some hacked together custom build process that I wrote myself (like bash build.sh), and entr lets me have a magical build experience where I get instant feedback on whether my change fixed the weird bug with just one line of bash. Hooray!
restart a server (entr -r)
Okay, but what if you’re running a server, and the server needs to be restarted every time you? entr’s got you – if you pass -r, then
git ls-files | entr -r python my-server.py
clear the screen (entr -c)
Another neat flag is -c, which lets you clear the screen before rerunning the command, so that you don’t get distracted/confused by the previous build’s output.
use it with git ls-files
Usually the set of files I want to track is about the same list of files I have in git, so git ls-files is a natural thing to pipe to entr.
I have a project right now where sometimes I have files that I’ve just created that aren’t in git just yet. So what if you want to include untracked files? Here’s a little bash incantation I put together that does this:
{ git ls-files; git ls-files . --exclude-standard --others; } | entr your-build-scriot
There’s probably a way to do this with just one git command but I don’t know what it is.
restart every time a new file is added: entr -d
The other problem with this git ls-files thing is that sometimes I add a new file, and of course it’s not in git yet. entr has a nice feature for this – if you pass -d, then if you add a new file in any of the directories entr is tracking, then it’ll exit.
I’m using this paired with a little while loop that will restart entr to include the new files, like this:
while true
do
{ git ls-files; git ls-files . --exclude-standard --others; } | entr -d your-build-scriot
done
how entr works on Linux: inotify
On Linux, entr works using inotify (a system for tracking filesystem events like file changes) – if you strace it, you’ll see an inotify_add_watch system call for each file you ask it to watch, like this:
inotify_add_watch(3, "static/stylesheets/screen.css", IN_ATTRIB|IN_CLOSE_WRITE|IN_CREATE|IN_DELETE_SELF|IN_MOVE_SELF) = 1152
that’s all!
I hope this helps a few people learn about entr!
via: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/06/28/entr/
作者：Julia Evans 选题：lujun9972 译者：译者ID 校对：校对者ID