Luamon is a utility for quick live development in Lua. It will monitor for any changes in your source and automatically restart your Lua script or application. It works by watching for file and directories changes using the inotify API. It was inspired by nodemon, but made for Lua.

• Automatic restarting of application.
• Default for lua, but easy to run any executable (such as python, make, etc).
• Ignoring specific files or directories.
• Watch specific directories.
• Works with server applications or one time run utilities and REPLs.

Install using LuaRocks:

luarocks install luamon

On Ubuntu you may have to install with:

luarocks install luamon INOTIFY_INCDIR=/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu

Make sure that you have luarocks binary PATH in your environment. And just run luamon with your script file as the input argument.

luamon myscript.lua

You can pass arguments to the script after --:

luamon myscript.lua -- --arg1 arg2

You can run with a different lua or any other language runner with -l:

luamon -l luajit myscript.lua

By default luamon tries to detect the language to be run and watches file extensions based on the detect language, for example in case you to run some file with .lua extension then it watches for any .lua file change in the working directory and runs lua.

Alternatively you can monitor different extensions with -e, for running python3 scripts for example you could do:

luamon -l python3 -e py myscript.py

Although you can just run python scripts by doing:

luamon myscript.py

Alternatively you can run any command with -x:

luamon -e js -x "nodejs app.js my args"

You could use for quick compile and testing C applications too:

luamon -e c,h -x "make && make test"

You can make more complex commands for live coding and testing:

luamon -e c,h,Makefile -l "make <input> && ./build/<input> <args>" example hello

The above calls make example && ./build/example hello on every .h, .c or Makefile file change.

Any option can be saved to a config file globally called .luamonrc in the user home folder or locally in the running folder, for example:

ext = {'h', 'c', 'Makefile'}
lang = "make <input> && ./build/<input> <args>"

Then you can just call:

luamon example

And will run as the example before.

You can override the languages to be detected in that config too, for example to make it uses always lua5.4 and python3 upon detection:

langs = {
  lua = {lang = 'lua5.4', ext = {'lua'}},
  python = {lang = 'python3', ext = {'py'}, ignore = {'.*', '*__pycache__*'}},
}

Some common languages comes pre configured like Lua, Python and Ruby, for all see the default config in luamon sources.

Usage: luamon [-h] [-v] [-q] [-V] [-f] [-o] [-s] [-x] [-r] [-t]
       [--no-color] [--no-hup] [-e <ext>] [-w <watch>] [-i <ignore>]
       [-c <chdir>] [-d <delay>] [-l <lang>] <input> [<args>] ...

luamon

Arguments:
   input                 Input script to run
   args                  Script arguments

Options:
   -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
   -v, --version         Print current luamon version and exit
   -q, --quiet           Be quiet, don't print any message
   -V, --verbose         Show details on what is causing restart
   -f, --fail-exit       Exit when the running command fails
   -o, --only-input      Watch only the input file for changes
   -s, --skip-first      Skip first run (wait for changes before running)
   -x, --exec            Execute a command instead of running a script
   -r, --restart         Automatically restart upon exit (run forever)
   -t, --term-clear      Clear terminal before each run
   --no-color            Don't colorize output
   --no-hup              Don't stop when terminal closes (SIGHUP signal)
      -e <ext>,          Extensions to watch, separated by commas (auto detected by default)
   --ext <ext>
        -w <watch>,      Directories to watch, separated by commas (default: .)
   --watch <watch>
         -i <ignore>,    Shell pattern of paths to ignore, separated by commas (default: .*)
   --ignore <ignore>
        -c <chdir>,      Change into directory before running the command
   --chdir <chdir>
        -d <delay>,      Delay between restart in milliseconds
   --delay <delay>
       -l <lang>,        Language runner to run (auto detected by default)
   --lang <lang>

The packages depends on POSIX and Inotify APIs so it works only on systems that supports them, such as Linux.

MIT