superwatcher

Why Care

Sure, you can watch for local file changes and react to those with a script, but can you watch for remote file changes in a git repository?

What It Does

superwatcher:

• watches git repositories for you
• keeps those repositores up to date
• triggers an update hook script on each update

With this simple tool combined with forever you can create an auto updating, auto restarting server. All you need to do to autodeploy to as many nodes as you like is git push.

Unlike pretty much every other autodeploy tool, superwatcher doesn't assume any specific workflow, you can watch any repository and branch you like, triggering an optional script after each update. Since that is just a shell script, you can do what you like

What It Is

superwatcher is a command line program that leverages good old cron to create a series of repository watchdogs.

Seems like folks are generally in love with git hooks, which works great except when one of your nodes is down and misses the hook and jams up the works. Using hooks is a push method. Using cron is a pull method. The benefit is that nodes that are down will eventually catch up as they pull in new changes. Self healing.

Cron is also nice in that is:

• survives reboots
• is already there and doesn't require installing another daemon as root

The watchdogs will leave configuration in ~/.superwatcher, just as plain text so you can hack and poke as you see fit.

How To Use It

npm install -g superwatcher

Yep, you'll need node.

superwatcher --help

...get the lay of the land

Update Triggers

These are just shell scripts, in the root of each watched repository.

Hooks wrap the auto update sequence, which goes like this:

1. Ask the git remote if there are missing local changes
2. If no, go back to sleep
3. If yes, run the superwatcher_before_update currently on disk, this will be the prior version, not the one incoming from the remote
4. Use git to fetch and reset to the current remote revision
5. Run the superwatcher_after_update currently on disk, this may have been freshly pulled

Environment

Cron is nice, except when it isn't. The exact environment you get in a cron job isn't always what you would expect, so superwatcher lets you set it explicitly. This will be sourced before every autoupdate sequence, and lets you do fun stuff like pick the right node, set PATH, etc.

Enough Already!

Ok, here is how you use the thing:

npm install -g superwatcher

superwatcher init

superwatcher watch git://github.com/wballard/superwatcher.demo.git ~/demo
superwatcher environment ~/demo/environment
superwatcher start

At this point, everything should run. All you need to do in order to push changes is update the git repository, which is ... well, you'll need to switch to your own repository :).

You can see what is going on with:

superwatcher info

And shut the whole thing down with:

superwatcher stop

Interactive

You can also superwatcher watchdog and run the watchdog manually without cron, it sleeps for a minute, then watchdogs. This is great to run under Docker.

Make a Sandwich

To get a super simple, self updating server, combine superwatcher with forever --watch --watchDirectory. This will give you auto update, and self restart on update.