Sidekick

Sidekick is a command line tool to automatically trigger actions on certain events, as defined per project, in a local .sidekick file in your project folder. It is a simpler alterative to Guard. If Guard is an engineering office, then Sidekick is duct tape. Here is a sample:

  watch('**/*.rb') { restart_passenger; rake 'docs' }
  auto_compile 'assets/*.sass', 'public/:name.css'
  every(10) { notify sh 'fortune' }

Use Sidekick to automatically restart dev servers, run builds, auto-compile Sass, CoffeeScript and others, continously test, periodically run tasks, or anything else; the world is yours to conquer.

• Simple and powerful DSL
• Easy to extend
• Notifications using Growl or libnotify
• Compiles many formats, thanks to Tilt.
• Powered by EventMachine and em-dir-watcher (= Mac, Linux and Windows support)
• Brief and concise codebase.

Install with gem install sidekick and invoke the sidekick command in your project folder. If you do not have a .sidekick file, you will be offered a template with plenty of examples.

Have a look at the existing triggers, and you will get the idea. Basically, you define new triggers by writing methods that hook into EventMachine the same way as in EM.run { .. }. If you write some useful extensions, ask me to merge them into the main repository!

Copyright (c) 2010 Jostein Berre Eliassen. See LICENSE for details.