Watch Your Media Folder

Introduction

Starting from v2.1.0, Koel provides a mean to help watch your media directory and trigger selective synchronization every time there's a change to it. With this you don't have to run a whole time-consuming koel:sync process for just one added song. The actual watching is done by inotifywait, a popular filesystem watcher for Linux – sorry Mac and Windows folks.

Only watch the media directory

In theory, you can watch any directory other than or outside of your media root. It's not recommended, however, as the next manual php artisan koel:sync call will simply remove all those "invalid" entries.

Installation

In order to start using the feature, follow these steps:

1. Install inotify Tools

On CentOS for example, you can run this shell command:

sudo yum --enablerepo=epel -y install inotify-tools

2. Set Up a Watcher Script

Now you need to set up a watcher script to run inotifywait and send the output to koel:sync artisan command. For example, you can create a sample watch file in Koel's root directory with this content:

#!/bin/bash

MEDIA_PATH=/var/www/media/
PHP_BIN=/usr/bin/php

inotifywait -rme move,close_write,delete --format "%e %w%f" $MEDIA_PATH | while read file; do
  $PHP_BIN artisan koel:sync "${file}"
done

3. Run the Watcher in the Background

Following the above example:

$ chmod +x watch
$ ./watch
[Ctrl+z]
$ bg
$ disown -h

4. Verify

You can now verify that it works by tail -f storage/logs/laravel.log while making changes to your media directory.