tony / watching-testrunner

Command line tool for watching files and re-running shell commands.

Why

Because unit testing is even more fun

• when you don't have to switch out of your editor to get feedback from unit tests.
• the shorter the feedback period is till you get feedback from your tests.

I've seen the usefullness toying with rubys autotest command, so I pestered Felix to build something like this, and after using it for about a two years, I finally got around to packaging it. :-)

In addition to that it's brain dead simple, has no dependencies and is really small.

Usage

% watching_testrunner --help
Usage: watching_testrunner [options] [--] command [arguments...]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -b BASEPATH, --basepath=BASEPATH
                        base path to watch for changes
  -p WATCH_WILDCARD, --pattern=WATCH_WILDCARD
                        glob-style pattern for file names to watch

Examples

$ watching_testrunner nosetests

This will run nosetests whenever any python file below the current directory changes

$ watching_testrunner -- nosetests $NOSETESTS_ARGUMENTS

Will run nosetests all the same, but will not try to parse any of the nosetests arguments.

$ watching_testrunner --basepath foo/bar --pattern="*" nosetests $NOSETESTS_ARGUMENTS

This will run nosetests whenever any file below ./foo/bar changes.

$ watching_testrunner --basepath path/to/js_tests --pattern="*.js" jasmine --console

This will run jasmine --console whenever any js file below ./path/to/js_tests changes (i.e. you can use the watching testrunner to get auto test execution using any tool for any language)