MacOS daemon to watch a file or folder and automatically commit changes to a git repo. Behaviour matches the original gitwatch bash script, so you can use gitwatchd as a drop-in replacement.
Watch a repo:
gitwatchd .
Every change is now committed automatically (debounced, so a burst of writes lands as one commit). Add a remote to push each commit too:
gitwatchd -r origin .
For something like a notes vault synced across machines, add -R pull and rebase before each push:
gitwatchd -r origin -b main -R .
This is the full list of available flags:
-s <secs> wait this long after the last change before committing (default 2)
-r <remote> push to this remote after every commit
-b <branch> branch to push to (with -r)
-R pull --rebase before each push
-m <msg> commit message; %d becomes the timestamp
-d <fmt> strftime format for that timestamp
-l <lines> use the diff itself as the commit message, up to <lines> lines (0 = no limit)
-L <lines> same as -l without colour. Known bug: on git versions > 2.39 this falls back to a status summary
-c <command> run this command and use its output as the commit message (overrides -m/-d)
-C pipe the changed file names into the -c command (requires -c flag, e.g. `gitwatchd -c 'xargs echo updated:' -C .`)
-x <pattern> skip changes whose path matches this regex
-M don't commit while a merge is in progress
-f commit anything already pending when watching starts
-g <path> location of the .git directory, if elsewhere
gitwatchd runs as an app in the top bar (this is the ~only legit way to have an always-running app on MacOS). You can manage what's being watched from there or from the terminal.
Terminal commands to manage what's being watched:
gitwatchd status
gitwatchd pause blog # by name or path
gitwatchd resume blog
gitwatchd rm blog
The set of repos to watch is stored in ~/.gitwatchd, you can also edit this file directly rather than using the terminal or top bar app.
brew tap will-howard/tap
brew trust --cask will-howard/tap/gitwatchd
brew install --cask gitwatchd
Or download the zip from releases and put gitwatchd.app in /Applications.
gitwatchd is a daemon (i.e. running in the background) reimplementation of gitwatch by Patrick Lehner and contributors. Free software under the GNU GPL v3.0, same as gitwatch.