Switchboard
Description
Do you ever get annoyed that your Downloads folder gets cluttered with all types of files? Do you wish you could automatically organise them into seperate, organised folders? Switchboard is a tool to help simplfy file organization on your machine/s.
Switchboard works by monitoring a directory you provide (or list of directories), and uses file system notifications to move a matched file to the appropriate destination directory of your choosing.
See the video below as example. Here, I give switchboard a path to watch, a destination where I want matched files to move to, and the file extension of the type of files I want to move.
You can also visit https://goswitchboard.io/ for all your documentation needs, news, and updates!
Installation
You can install switchboard pre-compiled binary in a number of ways.
Homebrew
brew tap Cian911/switchboard
brew install switchboard
// Check everything is working as it should be
switchboard -h
You can also upgrade the version of switchboard you already have installed by doing the following.
brew upgrade switchboard
Docker
docker pull ghcr.io/cian911/switchboard:${VERSION}
docker run -d -v ${SRC} -v ${DEST} ghcr.io/cian911/switchboard:${VERSION} watch -h
Go Install
go install github.com/Cian911/switchboard@${VERSION}
Manually
You can download the pre-compiled binary for your specific OS type from the OSS releases page. You will need to copy these and extract the binary, then move it to you local bin directory. See the example below for extracting a zipped version.
curl https://github.com/Cian911/switchboard/releases/download/${VERSION}/${PACKAGE_NAME} -o ${PACKAGE_NAME}
sudo tar -xvf ${PACKAGE_NAME} -C /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/switchboard
Quick Start
Using switchboard is pretty easy. Below lists the set of commands and flags you can pass in.
Run the switchboard application passing in the path, destination, and file type you'd like to watch for.
Usage:
watch [flags]
Flags:
--config string Pass an optional config file containing multiple paths to watch.
-d, --destination string Path you want files to be relocated.
-e, --ext string File type you want to watch for.
-h, --help help for watch
-p, --path string Path you want to watch.
--poll int Specify a polling time in seconds. (default 60)
To get started quickly, you can run the following command, passing in the path, destination, and file extenstion you want to watch for. See the example below.
switchboard watch -p /home/user/Downloads -d /home/user/Movies -e .mp4
We highly recommend using absolute file paths over relative file paths. Always include the
.when passing the file extension to switchboard.
And that's it! Once ran, switchboard will start observing the user downloads folder for mp4 files added. Once it receives a new create event with the correct file extension, it will move the file to the users movies folder.
Important Notes
Polling
We set a high polling time on switchboard as in some operating systems we don't get file closed notifications. Therefore switchboard implements a polling solution to check for when a file was last written to. If the file falls outside the time since last polled, the file is assumed to be closed and will be moved to the destination directory. This obviously is not ideal, as we can't guarentee that a file is actually closed. Therefore the option is there to set the polling interval yourself. In some cases, a higher polling time might be necessary.
Absolute File Path
As you might have noticed in the example above, we passed in the absolute file path. While relative file paths will work too, they have not been tested in all OS systems. Therefore we strongly recommend you use absolute file paths when running switchboard.
File Extenstion
You may have also noticed in the above example, we used .mp4 including the prefixed .. This is important, as switchboard will not match file extenstions correctly if the given --ext flag does not contain the ..
