Rerun a command when files change

A pretty common programming workflow: make a change, save a file, rebuild the app. When I’m writing JavaScript, if whatever tool I’m working with doesn’t support this on its own, I usually reach for nodemon. When I’m writing something else, like Go, I usually… uh, just restart manually every time I make a change.

Well, not anymore: there’s an awesome little command line tool called entr that I learned about from Julia Evans’ blog. It’s not installed by default on macOS, but it’s available on Homebrew.

The TL;DR is that you take a list of files to watch and pipe it to entr plus some command, and entr will rerun that command whenever one of those files changes. Like if you want to rerun tests when your files change:

find . -name "*.ts"" | entr npm test

A useful command to use in combination is git ls-files , which lists all the files that git is tracking:

git ls-files | entr npm test

The -r option will make it restart long-running tasks, which is perfect for webservers:

git ls-files | entr -r node server.js

There’s also the -c option, which will clear the screen every time it reruns:

git ls-files | entr -c tsc --noEmit