Watchman is an open source tool developed by Facebook and released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. The Watchman website [1] states: "Watchman exists to watch files and record when they change. It can also trigger actions (such as rebuilding assets) when matching files change."

Written in C, Watchman is multiplatform: It works on Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, and Illumos/Solaris. Windows is not listed as a supported operating system. Although the main goal of Watchman might not be as I describe in this article, its job is to trigger actions when a file changes. This functionality perfectly fits various needs.

Watchman might seem complex at first glance, with its options and configuration directives (yes, it is), but I'll start with some simple examples; then, you can delve deeper into the program on your own.

Replicating Files

Working with distributed or replicated systems is a common task these days. The magic word nowadays – the cloud – is an unclear term, but if you want to simplify the concept, the cloud is what years ago was called a "cluster." If you want to replicate a directory on a cluster of servers, a lot of software, besides shared storage like NFS, is at your disposal. However, often the learning curve is steep, yet the goal is so simple.

The basic scenario is as follows: You have a directory on a server and you want to replicate its content on another server. The simple way to achieve this is with a copy command (maybe using the rsync tool) triggered by a job scheduled in a crontab. Obviously this solution is not optimal, because the scheduled job will be executed even if the directory has not changed, the time between the execution of a task and a following one could be too long or too short, or the copy starts while a file is in a transitional stage, leading to some sort of inconsistency at a given time. Also, why wait until night to perform a backup? Sometimes it might be useful to copy a file as soon as possible.

In such a case, a handy tool like Watchman, which watches the tree of a directory (or a number of directories) and triggers an action when a change is detected, is a good solution.

Triggering Rsync

Install Watchman as instructed in the "Installation" box and start it with the command:

watchman watch /opt/repos

The path /opt/repos is an example of a directory that you might want to replicate to another server. In Watchman it is called the "root."

yum install git autogen autoconf automake gcc
cd /var/tmp
git clone https://github.com/facebook/watchman.git
cd watchman
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

At this point the /usr/local/var/run/watchman/<username>.state configuration file will look like Listing 1. The Watchman process is up and running, but right now, it is simply watching the directory and reporting changes in the logfiles. (You can also query the daemon for changed files from the command line).

01 {
02   "version": "3.0.0",
03   "watched": [
04     {
05       "path": "/opt/repos",
06       "triggers": []
07     }
08   ]
09 }

The next step is to define what action to trigger. The syntax is:

watchman -- trigger /opt/repos 'repos-sync' \
             -- /usr/local/sbin/sync.sh /opt/repos

Where 'repos-sync' is the name of the trigger and /usr/local/sbin/sync.sh is the script to invoke. Now the configuration file looks like Listing 2.

01 {
02   "version": "3.0.0",
03   "watched": [
04     {
05       "path": "/opt/repos",
06       "triggers": [
07         {
08           "name": "repos-sync",
09           "command": [
10             "/usr/local/sbin/sync.sh"
11           ],
12           "append_files": true,
13           "stdin": [
14             "name",
15             "exists",
16             "new",
17             "size",
18             "mode"
19           ]
20         }
21       ]
22     }
23   ]
24 }

The script that performs the rsync operation, sync.sh, will look like Listing 3. Your script might be more complex (e.g., by adding some sort of logging or notification via email). Please note that the environment variable WATCHMAN_ROOT is set by Watchman itself and contains the "root" (i.e., the watched directory). Make sync.sh executable by entering:

chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/sync.sh

However, you also need to implement SSH key authentication to use rsync over SSH without the need for a password. If you don't know how to do this, you'll find several articles on the Internet (e.g., at the TeachMeJoomla site [3]) describing this procedure.

01 #!/bin/bash
02
03 twinserver="remoteserver.your.domain"
04
05 rsync -avp --delete -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_rsync" \
   ${WATCHMAN_ROOT}/ ${twinserver}:${WATCHMAN_ROOT}/

Watching Multiple Directories

If you need to monitor more than one directory, you can reuse the same script, because the aforementioned WATCHMAN_ROOT variable contains the correct path. To do so, you need to run the commands as follows:

watchman watch /opt/repos2
watchman -- trigger /opt/repos2 'repos2-sync' \
         -- /usr/local/sbin/sync.sh

Now run the commands

watchman watch-list
watchman trigger-list <root>

to see the list of watched directories (without going to the .state file) and the list of triggers.