git-repo-watcher

A simple bash script to watch a git repository and pull upstream changes if available.

Usage

To start, only the file path to your git repository is needed. This will start a watcher that looks for changes every 10 seconds:

./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository"

The time interval can be changed by passing it to -i:

./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository" -i 60 #seconds

You can add your own logic to git-repo-watcher-hooks. For example, you can start your build process in case of changes:

# $1 - Git repository name
# $2 - Branch name
# $3 - Commit details
change_pulled() {
    echo "Starting build for commit: $@"
    ./your-build-script.sh
}

If you have more than one repository you can pass a copy of the git-repo-watcher-hooks file like so:

./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository" -h "/path/to/your/hooks-file"

Private repositories

The script works with private repositories.

First configure a password cache with git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=60". Make sure that the timeout is greater than the time interval given to the script. Both are given as seconds.

At startup, the program will execute git fetch and ask for your credentials.

If you want it to run in the background as a daemon process, you have to execute git fetch beforehand. For example:

cd "/path/to/your/repository"
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=60"
git fetch

# Checking exit code
if [[ $? -eq 1 ]]; then
    echo "Wrong password!" >&2
    exit 1
fi

# Disown process
./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository" > "/path/to/your/logfile.txt" &

Notes

• Make sure your local repository is tracking a remote branch, otherwise the script will fail.
• The test suite git-repo-watcher-tests is using the test framework shunit2, it will be downloaded automatically to your /tmp folder.
• Tested on Bash version 4 and 5.