watchman
Watch files and trigger actions when they change
Watchman is an open-source file watching service from Meta that records changes in a directory tree and triggers actions when files match configured patterns. It is self-hosted to power local automation workflows.
Key features
- File change watching
- Trigger commands on changes
- Efficient recursive watching
- Query API
Strengths
- Released under the MIT license
- Mature project with 13.7k GitHub stars
- Written in C++
- Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
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