AutoMate is a development tool. It scans a series of files and/or directories and executes a batch file if any of the scanned items are updated.

This allows an immediate triggering of build tools when a source file has been modified.

This program is undergoing a lot of changes. Anyone is welcome to use it, but at this point in time I would not recommend using it for a production product; I would recommend only using this for development projects by users who are comfortable updating their scripts as changes to this tool occur, and are comfrotable using software that is not fully tested.

dotnet tool install --global Eir.AutoMate

To update

dotnet tool uninstall --global Eir.AutoMate

dotnet tool install --global Eir.AutoMate

AutoMate has only one optional command line option. This option is the name of the json configuration file that configures the watches. If no name is passed on the command line, then the config file defaults to

AutoMate.json

AutoMate is controlled from a user defined json file.

The format of this file is json. The option data is an array of watches, each watch defines on set of files to watch for changes to, and the commands to execute when any changed are detected.

{
    "watchs": [
        {
            -- Watch 1
        },
        {
            -- Watch 2
        },
    "clearScreenTime": 30
    ]
}

clearScreenTime is in seconds. If a watch is triggered this many seconds after the last watch was triggered, the console screen will be cleared of all previous output.

Each watch has the following structure

{
    "name": "{name}",
	"filter" : "{filter}",
    "watchPaths": ["{watch path 1}, {watch path 2}]",
    "workingDir": "{working dir}",
	"cmdPath": "{command path}",
	"cmdArgs": "{command arguments}"
}

the command paths, arguments and working direcories may contain windows environment variables ('%{name}%') which will be expanded when run.

The following special environment variables will be set by AutoMate when running: