watchexec/watchexec v1.22.0

CLI v1.22.0

on GitHub

Software development often involves running the same commands over and over. Boring! Watchexec is a simple, standalone tool that watches a path and runs a command whenever it detects modifications. Install it today with cargo-binstall watchexec-cli, from the binaries below, find it in your favourite package manager, or build it from source with cargo install watchexec-cli.

In this release:

• New: --emit-events-to <mode> provides alternative ways to receive event details. To the environment mode, equivalent to the previous behaviour (and still the default), the file, stdin, json-file, and json-stdint modes are added. The watchexec-events crate can be used to parse the JSON format from Rust programs.
• New: --fs-events <events> provides a more flexible way to filter which kinds of filesystem events cause command runs. The --no-meta option is now an alias to the configuration of this method omitting metadata changes.
• New: --clear=reset performs a stronger screen clear (roughly equivalent to a tput reset).
• Whole new extended help, manual page, and completion scripts (now for bash, elvish, fish, nu, and powershell in addition to zsh).
• New: --manual shows the manual page, --help shows extended help (-h shows short help), --completion <shell> prints a completion script, such that even installing from source can benefit from the manpage or completions.

Other changes:

• New: --filter-file and --ignore-file provide ways to load arbitrary ignore files, and also "filter files", which should be formatted like ignore files but patterns are treated the same as --ignore patterns.
• New: --stop-signal lets you override the signal used to stop the process during a restart.
• New: --stop-timeout lets you override the time waited between sending a signal and killing the process (which defaults to 30 seconds).
• --log-file's path argument is now optional. Providing the bare --log-file option uses the current directory. Further, the option also accepts a directory instead of a file, in which case it will create a file named watchexec.<timestamp>.log there.
• --poll is the new name for --force-poll (the old name exists as an alias), and the polling interval is now optional, with a default provided if no value is given.
• All options that take durations now both take numbers in the unit described, but also expressions of the form 2mins 30s. This is a very similar format as systemd's durations, implemented by the humantime crate.
• Removed support for the "tagged" filterer experiment.
• The long --version option now prints extended version information, including the build date and commit hash (where that information is available). This is powered by a new crate, bosion.