Re: How to watch files in a Git repository

[Son Luong Ngoc <sluongng@gmail.com>]

Hi Diez,

> On Jun 6, 2022, at 6:04 PM, R. Diez <rdiez1999@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all:
> 
> I would like to get a notification e-mail when certain files or directories change in a Git repository.
> 
> In the good old CVS days, you could just 'watch' a file with your favourite CVS GUI.
> 
> Some online services like GitHub offer their own notification mechanism, but I would like something generic. I am not looking for a hook solution, because the Git repositories may not be mine, so I may only have read access.
> 
> The idea is that I can set up a cron job to periodically pull a repository, and run a script to generate the e-mails from the commit history. Any new commits which match the desired branch and modify the desired files and/or directories would trigger the notifications.
> 
> I've searched the Web, but couldn't find anything straightforward.

I would encourage you to try SourceGraph’s CodeMonitoring feature (1).
You can configure a search query which target a file path inside
a repository, then it will send email to you when there are new
commits/diffs touching those files.

I have no affiliation with them except for being a happy end user.
In fact, I used SourceGraph extensively while studying git/git codebase.

> 
> If there is nothing of the sort, I could write my own script in Bash or Perl. I can handle cron and sending e-mails, but I do not know much about Git's internals. Could someone provide a few pointers about how to code this? I would expect there is some command to list commits, and all files touched by a particular commit. And there would be some way to interface with Bash or Perl, which does not need parsing complicated text output from Git.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
>  rdiez

Cheers,
Son Luong

(1): https://docs.sourcegraph.com/code_monitoring