Guard

IMPORTANT: Please upgrade to Ruby >= 2.4 before installing Guard! To install for older versions, update Bundler at least 1.12:

gem update bundler

• Ruby 2.1 is officially outdated and unsupported!
• Ruby 2.2 is officially outdated and unsupported!
• Ruby 2.3 is officially outdated and unsupported!

:exclamation: Guard is currently accepting more maintainers. Please read this if you're interested in joining the team.

Guard automates various tasks by running custom rules whenever file or directories are modified.

It's frequently used by software developers, web designers, writers and other specialists to avoid mundane, repetitive actions and commands such as "relaunching" tools after changing source files or configurations.

Common use cases include: an IDE replacement, web development tools, designing "smart" and "responsive" build systems/workflows, automating various project tasks and installing/monitoring various system services.

For a full categorized list of known Guard plugins, look here: https://github.com/guard/guard/wiki/Guard-Plugins

If you have any questions about Guard or want to share some information with the Guard community, please go to one of the following places:

• Guard Wiki
• Google group.
• StackOverflow.
• IRC channel

  #guard

  (irc.freenode.net) for chatting.

Before you file an issue, make sure you have read the known issues and file an issue sections that contains some important information.

Features

• File system changes handled by our awesome Listen gem.
• Support for visual system notifications.
• Huge eco-system with more than 300 Guard plugins.
• Tested against the latest Ruby 2.4.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, JRuby & Rubinius. See

  .travis-ci.yml

  for the exact versions.

Screencast

Two nice screencasts are available to help you get started:

• Guard on RailsCast.
• Guard is Your Best Friend on Net Tuts+.

Installation

The simplest way to install Guard is to use Bundler.

Add Guard (and any other dependencies) to a

Gemfile

group :development do
  gem 'guard'
end

then install it by running Bundler:

$ bundle

Generate an empty

Guardfile

$ bundle exec guard init

Run Guard through Bundler with:

$ bundle exec guard

If you are on Mac OS X and have problems with either Guard not reacting to file changes or Pry behaving strange, then you should add proper Readline support to Ruby on macOS.

Avoiding gem/dependency problems

It's important that you always run Guard through Bundler to avoid errors.

If you're getting sick of typing

bundle exec

• (Recommended) Running

  bundle binstub guard

  will create

  bin/guard

  in your project, which means running

  bin/guard

  (tab completion will save you a key stroke or two) will have the exact same result as

  bundle exec guard

  .

• Or, you can

  alias be="bundle exec"

  in your

  .bashrc

  or similar and the execute only

  be guard

  . Protip: It will work for all comands executed in

  bundle exec

  context!

• Or, for RubyGems >= 2.2.0 (at least, though the more recent the better), simply set the

  RUBYGEMS_GEMDEPS

  environment variable to

  -

  (for autodetecting the Gemfile in the current or parent directories) or set it to the path of your Gemfile.

(To upgrade RubyGems from RVM, use the

rvm rubygems

NOTE: this Rubygems feature is still under development still lacks many features of bundler

• Or, for RubyGems < 2.2.0 check out the Rubygems Bundler.

Add Guard plugins

Guard is now ready to use and you should add some Guard plugins for your specific use. Start exploring the many Guard plugins available by browsing the Guard organization on GitHub or by searching for

guard-

When you have found a Guard plugin of your interest, add it to your

Gemfile

group :development do
  gem ''
end

See the init section of the Guard usage below to see how to install the supplied plugin template that you can install and to suit your needs.

Usage

Guard is run from the command line. Please open your terminal and go to your project work directory.

Look here for a full list of Guard commands

Start

Just launch Guard inside your Ruby or Rails project with:

$ bundle exec guard

Guard will look for a

Guardfile

guardfile.rb

$HOME

.Guardfile

Please look here to see all the command line options for Guard

Interactions

Please read how to interact with Guard on the console and which signals Guard accepts

Guardfile DSL

For details on extending your

Guardfile

Issues

Before reporting a problem, please read how to File an issue.

Development / Contributing

See the Contributing Guide.

Releasing

Prerequisites

• You must have commit rights to the GitHub repository.
• You must have push rights for rubygems.org.

How to release

1. Determine which would be the correct next version number according to semver.
2. Update the version in

   ./lib/guard/version.rb

   .
3. Commit the version in a single commit, the message should be "Bump VERSION to X.Y.Z".
4. Push and open a pull request.
5. Once CI is green, merge the pull request.
6. Pull the changes locally and run

   bundle exec rake release:full

   ; this will tag, push to GitHub, publish to rubygems.org, and publish the release notes .

Author

Thibaud Guillaume-Gentil (@thibaudgg)

Core Team

• R.I.P. :broken_heart: Michael Kessler.
• Rémy Coutable.
• Thibaud Guillaume-Gentil (@thibaudgg, thibaud.gg).

Contributors

https://github.com/guard/guard/graphs/contributors