Automatically run tests when a source file is modified (Perl 6)

perl6-run-tests.sh

#!/bin/bash

while inotifywait \
  --quiet --quiet \
  --recursive \
  --event close_write \
  lib/ @lib/.precomp/ bin/ t/; do \
clear; \
prove --exec perl6 --lib --verbose; \
done

Dependencies

• inotifywait is provided by the APT package inotify-tools in Debian and in Ubuntu.
• prove is a Perl 5 program provided by the CPAN module App::Prove (fortunately, that ships with Debian/Ubuntu)

You might want to check out this Perl 6 presentation where Jonathan Worthington builds a test runner that watches your source directories via OS events all with Perl 6 http://jnthn.net/papers/2015-yapcasia-concurrency.pdf and the video https://youtu.be/JpqnNCx7wVY?t=1518

@MattOates: Thanks for the suggestion! 😄 👍

I wasn't aware of that slide in the talk, and it looks like IO::Notification is in the official documentation. 😁

Another CLI program that I've come across, as an alternative to inotifywait(1), is entr(1). Seems more straightforward.

I believe one way to achieve the same setup using entr(1) is something like:

$ ls bin/* lib/*.pm6 t/*.t | entr -cr prove --exec perl6 -v

Also, replacing the ls ... idea with git ls-tree --name-only -r HEAD may also prove useful.