Git Repo Watcher

A simple bash script to watch a git repository and pull upstream changes if available.

Requirements

• Bash with Version > 3
• Tested on Ubuntu, Debian, MacOS, Windows Git Shell, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Basically, it will work anywhere you can install Bash.

If something doesn't work, please let me know.

Usage

You only need the path to your git repository to start.

This will start a watcher that looks for changes every 10 seconds:

./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository"

The time interval can be changed by passing it to -i:

./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository" -i 60 #seconds

Make sure your local repository is tracking a remote branch, otherwise the script will fail.

Customizations

You can add your own logic to the file: git-repo-watcher-hooks

For example, you can start your build process in case of changes:

# $1 - Git repository name
# $2 - Branch name
# $3 - Commit details
change_pulled() {
    echo "Starting build for commit: $@"
    ./your-build-script.sh
}

If you have more than one repository you can pass a copy of the git-repo-watcher-hooks file like so:

./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository" -h "/path/to/your/hooks-file"

Private repositories

The script works with private repositories.

First configure a password cache with git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=60".
Make sure the timeout is greater than the time interval given to the script. Both are given as seconds.
The program will execute git fetch and ask for your login data. The script itself does not store passwords!

If you want it to run in the background as a daemon process, you have to execute git fetch beforehand.

Example code:

cd "/path/to/your/repository"
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=60"
git fetch

# Checking exit code
if [[ $? -eq 1 ]]; then
    echo "Wrong password!" >&2
    exit 1
fi

# Disown process
./git-repo-watcher -d "/path/to/your/repository" > "/path/to/your/logfile.log" & disown

Windows 10

The easiest way is to install Git Shell, which also comes with bash.
The only thing you have to consider are the file separators. The Unix format should be used here:

C:\YourGitRepository → /C/YourGitRepository

It is a little more difficult with WSL.
This must first be installed and configured via the Windows Store. The file structure is also slightly different:

C:\YourGitRepository → /mnt/c/YourGitRepository

Tests

The test suite git-repo-watcher-tests is using the test framework shunit2, it will be downloaded automatically to your /tmp folder.
The script has no other dependencies and requires no internet connection.

The tests create several test git repositories in the folder: /tmp/git-repo-watcher.

A git user should be configured, otherwise the tests will fail.
With the following line you can check if this is the case:

git config --list

You can configure it as follows:

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"