Vidibus::WatchFolder

This gem lets you create multipe watch folders within your application, e.g. to provide individual FTP mount points for customers, maybe in combination with Vidibus::Pureftpd.

To store each watch folder configuration, Mongoid (~> 3) is used. Files are processed asynchronously with DelayedJob.

This gem is part of Vidibus, an open source toolset for building distributed (video) applications.

Add gem 'vidibus-watch_folder' to the Gemfile of your application. Then call bundle install on your console.

This gem relies on Listen to detect changes. If you're on Windows, you'll want to install an additional file system adapter to increase performance:

# Windows only!
gem 'wdm', '~> 0.0.3'

Setting up a custom watch folder model is easy. Since it's a Mongoid::Document, all of the ActiveModel magic is at your disposal. Just add some watch folder settings:

class Example < Vidibus::WatchFolder::Base

  # Define a root directory to store files in.
  root Rails.root.join('examples')

  # Define folders that should automatically be created.
  folders 'in', 'out'

  # Define callbacks to perform when files change.
  #
  # Use filter :when to define events to watch. Supported event types are:
  #   :added, :modified, :removed
  #
  # Add filter :delay to perform callback later. Execution will be delayed
  # until the watched file will not have been changed for given period of time.
  # This is useful for waiting until an upload is completed.
  #
  # Set filter :ignore to exclude file names matching given regex.
  #
  # Provide :folders to limit this callback to certain folders.
  callback :create_upload, {
    :when => :added,
    :delay => 1.minute,
    :folders => 'in',
    :ignore => /^\.pureftpd-upload/
  }
  callback :destroy_upload, :when => :removed

  # Callback to process created files
  def create_upload(event, path)
    ...
  end

  # Callback to handle deleted files
  def destroy_upload(event, path)
    ...
  end
end

Handling a watch folder instance is straightforward:

example = Example.create

# Access instance properties
example.uuid   # => 98fe6010e7b5012f7e4c6c626d58b44c
example.path   # => '/path/to/rails/examples/98fe6010e7b5012f7e4c6c626d58b44c/'
example.files  # => ['<FILE_PATH>', ...]

# Destroy the instance (will remove its path, too)
example.destroy

File changes are detected by performing Vidibus::WatchFolder.listen. Beware, this method is blocking, so better spawn the daemon.

To run the listener as daemon, this gem provides a shell script. Install it with

rails g vidibus:watch_folder

The daemon requires that gem 'daemons' is installed. To spawn him, enter

script/watch_folder start

To collect the paths to listen to, Vidibus::WatchFolder.listen requires that all classes inheriting Vidibus::WatchFolder::Base have been loaded.

Because Rails is autoloading almost everything in development, this requirement is not met without the help of a little hack: To trigger autoloading, the listener collects all aforementioned class names from the app directory and constantizes them.

So here's the caveat: If you define watch folder models outside of the app directory, you'll have to let the listener know. An initializer is perfect for that:

# Collect all watch folder models in lib, too
Vidibus::WatchFolder.autoload_paths << '/lib/**/*.rb'

A Capistrano configuration is included. Require it in your Capistrano config.rb.

require 'vidibus/watch_folder/capistrano'

That will add a bunch of callback hooks.

after 'deploy:stop',    'vidibus:watch_folder:stop'
after 'deploy:start',   'vidibus:watch_folder:start'
after 'deploy:restart', 'vidibus:watch_folder:restart'

If you need more control over the callbacks, you may load just the recipes without the hooks.

require 'vidibus/watch_folder/capistrano/recipes'

In case you want to put files into a shared folder, you may run into a validation issue. Here's a configuration for our watch folder example that gets symlinked with a twist:

namespace :examples do
  task :setup do
    path = File.join(shared_path, 'examples')
    run "mkdir -p #{path}"
    run "chmod -R 777 #{path}"
  end

  task :symlink do
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/examples #{release_path}/"
  end
end

after 'deploy:setup', 'examples:setup'
before 'deploy:assets:precompile', 'examples:symlink'

The important thing is the last line. Instead of the usual after 'deploy:update_code' hook we're triggering the symlink on before 'deploy:assets:precompile'. The reason is that precompiling initializes the Rails app which will fail if the example directory does not exist yet.

To test this gem, call bundle install and bundle exec rspec spec on your console.

When testing your application you may want to define a different root path for your watch folder models. Just override them somewhere in your test files, for example in spec_helper.rb:

# Set different root for watch folder example
Example.root('spec/support/examples')

Make sure that directory exists. From your Rails root call:

mkdir spec/support/examples
touch spec/support/examples/.gitkeep

To clean up the test folders, add the following to your RSpec config:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each) do
    FileUtils.rm_r(Dir['spec/support/examples/*'].reject {|e| e == '.gitkeep'})
  end
end

© 2012-2013 André Pankratz. See LICENSE for details.