Rerun unit tests whenever files update

Jonathan Hartley

2010-10-15 01:43

In which I once again indulge my obscure command-line fetish.

I often spend hours of my day cycling through:

Edit code and its unit tests
Save my changes
Push a button or change window focus to explicitly re-run the code's unit tests.

Oh frabjous day, the grinding manual labour of the last of these three steps can now be banished forever, courtesy of rerun, a command line Python script that re-runs a given command whenever it detects changes to any of the files in the current directory, or its subdirectories.

https://github.com/tartley/rerun

Update: It's Python 2 & 3, and works great on Windows XP, Macs and Ubuntu.

For example: I had previously bound f6 in Vim to 'run the current file's unit tests. Now I've bound shift-f6 to rerun the current file's unit tests in a new console window. This pops up a new window showing the test results. I then continue editing in Vim, and whenever I hit save, the unit tests are re-run in the other window. All the while the focus stays on my editor. It's really sweet!

Thanks for the original idea goes to to the bash command watch, and an old (now offline) blog post by Jeff Winkler.