fs-librarian

Filesystem Librarian

Librarian runs pre-configured commands against a group of files that match a set of filters. The group of files is called a library. Librarian can either search for files in a library or watch for when files in the library are created or updated.

To run Librarian once, where it exits after searching through a list of configured libraries, run:

fs-librarian single-shot path/to/config.toml

To make Librarian continually watch for when files in configured libraries are created or updated, run:

fs-librarian watch path/to/config.toml

Installation

You can use the pre-built binaries on the release page. They run as standalone binaries and don't require any prerequisite software installed on your machine.

On macOS, you can use Homebrew to install and update Librarian:

brew tap jasonrogena/librarian
brew install fs-librarian

Building

To build Librarian, make sure you have rustup installed on your machine (installation instructions are here) then run:

make clean build

The binary target/release/fs-librarian will be generated.

Configuration

An example configuration file can be found here.

Libraries

In the Librarian configuration file, define one or more "libraries" of files. A library is a set of files that match defined search filters. Supported search filters are:

• A required list of parent directories the file can be in
• An optional list of regexes the file's MIME type should match

For each of the defined libraries, provide a Tera template (whose syntax is based on Jinja2) of the command that should run when a file is found. The following variables are available to the template:

• {{ file_path }}: The path to the file that was found
• {{ mime_type }}: The MIME type for the file that was found. Run the fs-librarian test mime <path to a file> command to display the MIME types of files you are unsure about.

The following configuration snippet defines a music library which watches for files inside the Downloads and /tmp directories that have MIME types matching the audio/.+ regex (e.g. audio/flac and audio/ogg). When an audio file is found, it is moved to the Music directory:

[libraries.music]
command = """
mv "{{ file_path }}" /home/jrogena/Music/
"""

  [libraries.music.filter]
  directories = [ "/home/jrogena/Downloads", "/tmp" ]
  mime_type_regexes = [ "audio/.+" ]

Filesystem Watching

The following configurations, related to filesystem watching, are available:

• min_command_exec_freq: Optional. The minimum frequency (in seconds) between running the configured command against a file. Useful in situations where a file is updated frequently but you don't want Librarian to run against the file as frequently as it is updated.

The following snippet is an example filesystem watching configuration:

[fs_watch]
min_command_exec_freq = 60

Considerations

Consider the following when using Librarian:

• Librarian does not limit itself to files in the root of the configured filter directories. It will also consider files in sub-directories.
• The pre-configured commands will run concurrently against your libraries. In single-shot mode, a separate thread will be used for each of the configured libraries. Watch mode will use a separate thread for each file-update notification. Race conditions might occur if the same file matches the filters for more than one library or if a pre-configured command you provide isn't safe to be run more than once, concurrently, against the same file.
• Librarian relies on OS-specific MIME-type databases. Therefore, it is possible for the same file to appear to have a different MIME-type on different OSs.
• In watch mode, expect that the pre-configured command will be called more than once when a file is created or updated (once for each file-update notification emitted by the OS). Some OSs emit more than one notification (e.g. IN_CREATE and IN_CLOSE_WRITE on Linux) when a file is changed. You can avoid the pre-configured command from running more than once for every file update using the min_command_exec_freq option.
• Use absolute paths in your configuration files. Librarian might not behave as expected if you use relative paths.

License

MIT