Using Python's Watchdog to monitor changes to a directory

Watchdog is a handy Python package which uses the inotify Linux kernel subsystem to watch for any changes to the filesystem.

This makes it an excellent foundation to build a a small script which takes action whenever a file is received in a directory, or any of the directory's contents change. An example might be a client-facing sftp server where you may want to receive an email when a file is received.

I've included a shortened version of a watcher.py script I used for just such a purpose. There are 2 main classes:

1. Watcher - this waits for any events on the watched directory
2. Handler - this is the event handler that takes action when an event is received

import time
from watchdog.observers import Observer
from watchdog.events import FileSystemEventHandler


class Watcher:
    DIRECTORY_TO_WATCH = "/path/to/my/directory"

    def __init__(self):
        self.observer = Observer()

    def run(self):
        event_handler = Handler()
        self.observer.schedule(event_handler, self.DIRECTORY_TO_WATCH, recursive=True)
        self.observer.start()
        try:
            while True:
                time.sleep(5)
        except:
            self.observer.stop()
            print "Error"

        self.observer.join()


class Handler(FileSystemEventHandler):

    @staticmethod
    def on_any_event(event):
        if event.is_directory:
            return None

        elif event.event_type == 'created':
            # Take any action here when a file is first created.
            print "Received created event - %s." % event.src_path

        elif event.event_type == 'modified':
            # Taken any action here when a file is modified.
            print "Received modified event - %s." % event.src_path


if __name__ == '__main__':
    w = Watcher()
    w.run()

To use this, just run python watcher.py from your console. If you open any console window and upload a file or make any changes, you will see this printed out in your original console window. 

To actually make this useful, you should wrap this up as a daemon or upstart script which can be run indefinitely.