I’ve recently switched to a project where the temporary product we’re building is built in Java 7 using Maven as a build system. As a productive developer and tester, it’s great to have a continually running set of tests as well as compilation to make sure things are working. It’s particularly awesome for TDD-flow and gets you thinking at a higher level [1].

On previous nodejs projects, I had grown accustomed to using grunt watch to run a set of commands (usually, build then unit test then a small smoke test of contract tests). When I looked into Maven, there didn’t seem to be a great plugin for auto-running commands.

I came across this Stack Overflow thread which pointed me to a number of options, including shell scripts, nodedemon and entr. Googling also turned up filewatcher.

I’ve been trying out entr or Event Notify Test Runner to use it’s full name and really like it as part of a continuous testing workflow. To quote from the entr site:

The Event Notify Test Runner is a general-purpose Unix utility intended to make rapid feedback and automated testing natural and completely ordinary.

That sounds like my kind of tool. Let’s give it a go!

To install entr, you can use Homebrew:

brew install entr

You can also download it from the entr homepage and install it manually.

Once installed, you can trigger entr file watching for a certain set of files using a pipe command:

find ~/some_directory | entr some_command

The find command lists all the files in the some_directory and then entr will run some_command if any of the files you listed change.

For instance, in our Java app’s directory I can run:

find src/ | entr mvn clean install

which runs mvn clean install if anything in our source code directory changes, saving me from having to trigger it manually. After starting it, you’ll really quickly get used to having your tests running constantly providing fast feedback to you. As a side benefit, you’ll begin to quickly feel the pain of a slow-running test suite and you’ll work to fix that!

There’s a lot of useful options available in entr, such as the -c flag to clear the screen before a run. There’s also an example on the entr page for tracking if there are new folders or files added (that’s because it’s triggered off the list that you piped in). You can also do crazy stuff with tmux to control other applications in other tmux panes.

In all, entr is a small, useful utility that makes your programming life much easier.

[1] Bret Victor is a big proponent of the argument that the traditional way that we program of writing code, hitting a compile button and then seeing the output is old-fashioned. This isn’t anywhere close to that (you should see Apple’s Playgrounds for a version of that idea) but it at least gets me away from using IntelliJ’s bastardised tools or having to run command line actions.