I built a file-watching tool
I love automating small tasks. Itโs so satisfying to have something done for me automatically without having to open a terminal and run a command.
One thing I do a lot is to convert .heic or .heif files from my iPhone to JPG. I was thinking about writing a little alias in my ~/.zshrc but then it occurred to me, โsurely there must be a way to do this automatically!โ.
So I did a little research with Claude and learned about the Chokidar NodeJS library which is โA minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library.โ
At first, I was just going to write a little NodeJS script which watched my downloads directory and automatically converted files to JPG. But then it occurred to me, I could do lots of automation with this.
So I wrote:
File Watcher (fw) โ A cli tool for watching folders and triggering actions
You define a rules YAML file which has different rules tied to different folders and file events. Each rule has an action which then does whatever you want to the file. At the moment, actions are just shell scripts but I plan to add some kind of plugin architecture to allow for more complicated actions.
For example, hereโs my rules file with the rule to convert .heic and .heif files:
rules:
- name: "Convert images to JPG"
path: /Users/mark/Downloads
pattern: "*.{png,webp,heic,heif,tiff,tif,bmp,avif}"
events: [add]
action: 'magick "{filepath}" "{dir}/{basename}.jpg" && osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to delete POSIX file \"{filepath}\""'
onFailure: stopThat converts the file and puts the original in the macOS trash can. In theory, this works on Linux too (I havenโt tested) so this rule would need to be tweaked a bit for Linux.
Rules can be tied to add, change, and unlink (delete) events. We donโt currently support a single rule with multiple events. Though you can have a single rule which watches multiple paths.
rules:
- name: "Some rule"
path:
- /tmp
- /Users/mark/Downloads
...For now, I run the tool manually in a terminal but the README has instructions for running it as a service on macOS or Linux. There are also lots of example rules and details about the rules file syntax.
Hopefully somebody else will find this useful. If you come up with any fun rules, let me know here or on GitHub.
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