README

Lurkerlite provides PHP utilities for monitoring files and directories for changes. It is a fork of henrikbjorn/lurker.

Usage

Use composer to install the package:

composer require totten/lurkerlite

Lurker works by giving the resource watcher a tracking id which is the name of the event and a path to the resource you want to track.

When all the resources have been added that should be track you would want to add event listeners for them so your can act when the resources are changed.

<?php

use Lurker\Event\FilesystemEvent;
use Lurker\ResourceWatcher;

$watcher = new ResourceWatcher;
$watcher->track('twig.templates', '/path/to/views');

$watcher->addListener('twig.templates', function (FilesystemEvent $event) {
    echo $event->getResource() . 'was' . $event->getTypeString();
});

$watcher->start();

The above example would watch for all events create, delete and modify. This can be controlled by passing a third parameter to track().

<?php

$watcher->track('twig.templates', '/path/to/views', FilesystemEvent::CREATE);
$watcher->track('twig.templates', '/path/to/views', FilesystemEvent::MODIFY);
$watcher->track('twig.templates', '/path/to/views', FilesystemEvent::DELETE);
$watcher->track('twig.templates', '/path/to/views', FilesystemEvent::ALL);

Note that FilesystemEvent::ALL is a special case and of course means it will watch for every type of event.

Comparison

totten/lurkerlite v1.3 is a fork of henrikbjorn/lurker v1.2. The original lurker provides a portable ResourceWatcher which monitors files and directories. Depending on operating-system and runtime support, it chooses a different backend driver for tracking files. This is a great idea, and the implementation has lots of tests.

The distinguishing characteristic of lurkerlite is that it has no formal dependencies on other packages, which means it is:

• Less prone to version conflicts and stale dependencies
• Safer to embed in more contexts

lurkerlite should be a drop-in replacement for lurker unless you previously customized the event-dispatcher. If you customized the event-dispatcher, see CHANGELOG.md.

Known Issues (Patch-welcome)

Lurker is designed to support multiple file-watching backends, most notably:

• RecursiveIteratorTracker: A portable (but less-efficient) backend based on filesystem polling.
• InotifyTracker: A more efficient backend based on the Linux inotify API and PECL's inotify extension.

At time of writing, InotifyTracker does not pass its tests, and the cause has not been determined. (Did it ever work? Does it only work in certain environments?) Consequently, it is disabled by default in the stable release. (To use the unstable implementation, call new ResourceWatcher(new InotifyTracker()).

See also:

• \Lurker\Tests\Tracker\TrackerTest::testMoveSubdirResource()
• \Lurker\Tests\Tracker\InotifyTrackerTest::testMoveSubdirResource()
• flint#32