README

2014/11/13 2015/01/17 2015/04/04 2016/09/25 Hoon H.

Provides dead-simple access to FSEvents framework for Swift. Low level core is written in Objective-C due to lack of support from Swift. (lacks some flags, lacks C-callback function)

How To Use

First, you need to add this framework to your Xcode project. If you're not sure how to add this framework to your existing Xcode project, please see this video posting.

• A proper way to add a subproject to another Xcode project

Here's a minimal example code which waits for events and prints them. This single statement does everything all needed jobs to setup. Just keep the created object as long as you want to receive the events.

	import Cocoa
	import EonilFileSystemEvents

	@NSApplicationMain
	class AppDelegate: NSObject, NSApplicationDelegate {

		@IBOutlet weak var window: NSWindow!
		
		let	s1 = FileSystemEventMonitor(
			pathsToWatch: [
				"~/Documents".stringByExpandingTildeInPath, 
				"~/Temp".stringByExpandingTildeInPath],
			latency: 1,
			watchRoot: true,
			queue: dispatch_get_main_queue()) { (events: [FileSystemEvent])->() in
				println(events)
			}
	}

If you want to stop monitoring, just remove all the strong references.

	var m: FileSystemEventMonitor? = FileSystemEventMonitor( /* arguments omitted */ )
	// Now it started.

	m = nil 
	// Now it stopped. Because it's dead. 

Please take care that object reference can be shared in Swift, so you need to ensure no other object to reference the monitor object. If you're not familiar with reference-counting, please see this: Automatic Reference Counting

See TestdriveApp target for another fully fledged Swift example. The example app starts monitoring when it becomes active, and stops monitoring when it becomes inactive. Try it!

Explanation

Use FileSystemEventMonitor class. Required informations are all noted as comments. Create it, and monitoring will start immediately. Deallocate it to stop monitoring. (RAII semantics) Supplied callback block will be notified on specified event.

Unfortunately, as Swift does not support static library target, you cannot link this as a library to a command-line programs currently. So examples had to written as an AppKit application target.

For Objective-C programs, use EonilFileSystemEventStream class. Required informations are all noted as comments. This class follows strict Objective-C conventions, so should be straightforward. It is unclear how long I will keep the Objective-C version.

Note

This library requires macOS 10.10 to run and Xcode 8.0 to build.

I also have another version of file-system watcher library. It's not extensively tested, but you can check it out if you're interested. This is clean-slated Swift3 implementation with directing binding to C API without Objective-C stuffs.

• https://github.com/eonil/fsevents-unofficial-wrapper

License

This library is written by Hoon H. and licensed under "MIT License".