hubmon

Run a command, watch the filesystem, stop the process on file change and then run the command again...

Install

You can install this command line tool with npm like this:

npm install -g hubmon

Usage

Basic usage

hubmon must be used as a prefix before the command you want to run.

Here's an example on how to use hubmon with a command like ls -la src:

hubmon ls -la src

In this example, hubmon will:

• watch the filesystem for changes
• run the command ls -la src

On each filesystem change, hubmon will:

• kill the process if it's still running
• run the command ls -la src again

NOTE: Killing the process if it's still running is very useful if you command runs an HTTP server for example.

Using the --watch option

By default, all files (except dotfiles) are watched (with the **/* glob pattern). If you want to only watch some files, you can use a different glob pattern with the --watch option (or its short -w alias) like this:

hubmon --watch '*.txt' ls -la src

WARNING: the quote around the glob pattern is important.

Using the --watch option with multiple patterns

You can pass multiple patterns by join them with a comma like this:

hubmon --watch '*.txt,*.sql' ls -la src

Ignoring files with the --watch option

If you want to ignore some files, you can use patterns prefixed with !.

Here's an example where you watch all files in src but not the .sql files:

hubmon --watch 'src/**/*,!src/**/*.sql' ls -la src

Under the hood, hubmon uses picomatch for glob patterns, please refer to their docs for more details.

Defining aliases for script runners

If you often use hubmon with commands like node, python or ruby, it can be nice to set some aliases like these:

alias wnode='hubmon node'
alias wpython='hubmon python'
alias wruby='hubmon ruby'

This way, in a few keystrokes, you can add the letter w (like watch) at the beginning of your command to trigger hubmon's watching mechanism:

wnode my-script.js

A note about Volta

If you're using Node.js with volta, we have a special trick for you. By default, the way volta handles automatic version switch would break. We added some special code so the versions you defined for npm, yarn and node are the right one.