srhyne / plopr

Continuously sync your project's changes to your remote hosts.

Plopr

Continuously sync your project's changes to your remote hosts.

What is it?

Plopr is a very simple tool. It watches your project for file & folder changes then efficiently syncs the change delta to your hosts. It's like Parse.com's CLI parse deploy in continuous mode.

How do I use it?

1. clone this repo!
2. symlink the binary cd /usr/local/bin ln -s /path/to/plopr/bin/plopr
3. Within your project create a ploprfile.json file.
4. Configure Plopr for your project through ploprfile.json See the example in the repo.
5. call plopr from within the desired level in your project
6. That's it! Your code changes will sync to your hosts!

Options

--watch=0 = Turn off watch and just run plopr 1 time

ploprfile.json

See the ploprfile example for configuration options..

What does this solve?

Killer multi-server software development. With Plopr, you can write your code on your local machine and instantly have your changes be reflected on 3+ dev hosts. It makes testing distributed architecture a lot easier.

Vagrant and docker are great for development but I wanted way to just write code on my local machine and have it update all of my physical test nodes instantly.

I wouldn't advise using this as a production deployment tool. Just in the same way I would advise using SFTP. It's just a great way to test code on multiple nodes.

Other options

Develop through Shell on the box! - I'm not a VIM guy, I love my Sublime Text and I still don't know how developing off the node directly will sync those changes to other nodes.

SFTP - Code resides on the server not my local machine, I don't want my git repo on the server, just my files necessary to run

FUSE - Same sort of thing as SFTP really. I have had issues with blocking on files saves and cludgy behavior

Dropbox - I tried using dropbox as a syncing tool. However, I ran into problems excluding files and folders from the sync. Dropbox has options to exclude files but I found them limiting. I ended up thinking about using rsync to transfer files to my Dropbox, then Plopr was born.

How does this work?

It's really pretty simple actually.

• rsync - does the heavy lifting of syncing changes incrementally to your hosts
• fswatch - brew install fswatch, watches file & folder changes in your project then (in batch) fires rsync.
• Plopr - is the sugar that makes the configuration and implementation much easier.