Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working on-and-off on Reporter, a new command line utility to make it easier to keep track of changes to your files.

Reporter generates email reports letting you know about changes over time. It’s intended to fill in one of the missing pieces from services like Dropbox for folks who choose to self-host their files using network shares, or tools like Syncthing1, providing both a quick sanity check that file changes match expectations and an easy way to discover edits in files shared with others.

Reporter generates clean email reports showing file changes

Reporter works by scanning your files and generating a snapshot containing paths, modification times, sizes, and shasums. It then compares this snapshot to the previous one and sends an email summary if there have been any changes. It includes a built in SMTP client (using Swift-SMTP from the Kitura project) to avoid the need to rely on platform-provided mailers and, while it’s written in Swift, compiles and runs happily on Linux (I run it primarily on my Raspberry Pi based home Syncthing mirror).

There’s not much more to say. Reporter is a simple tool with a single purpose. I find it incredibly useful and maybe you will too. Right now, you’ll need to build it from source (and there are some known issues), but if there’s interest, I’ll look into packaging for various platforms. You can find it on GitHub. I’d love to hear how you get on.

  1. Which, although a little nuanced to set up, is an absolutely wonderful tool I can’t recommend enough. ↩