Triggered execution¶

You can make a command run when certain files change by prefixing the command with ~. Monitoring is terminated when enter is pressed. This triggered execution is configured by the watch setting, but typically the basic settings watch-sources and poll-interval are modified as described in later sections.

The original use-case for triggered execution was continuous compilation:

> ~ test:compile

> ~ compile

You can use the triggered execution feature to run any command or task, however. The following will poll for changes to your source code (main or test) and run test-only for the specified test.

> ~ test-only example.TestA

The command passed to ~ may be any command string, so multiple commands may be run by separating them with a semicolon. For example,

> ~ ;a ;b

This runs a and then b when sources change.

• watchSources defines the files for a single project that are monitored for changes. By default, a project watches resources and Scala and Java sources.
• watchTransitiveSources then combines the watchSources for the current project and all execution and classpath dependencies (see .scala Build Definition for details on inter-project dependencies).

To add the file demo/example.txt to the files to watch,

watchSources <+= baseDirectory { _ / "demo" / "examples.txt" }

pollInterval selects the interval between polling for changes in milliseconds. The default value is 500 ms. To change it to 1 s,

pollInterval := 1000 // in ms