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Quick Start

This guide will help you get started with Blink quickly. We'll cover the basics of watching a directory for changes and receiving events.

Basic Usage

The simplest way to use Blink is to watch the current directory:

blink

This will start Blink with default settings, watching the current directory for changes and serving events on http://localhost:12345/events.

You should see output similar to:

Blink File System Watcher
-------------------------
Watching directory: .
Serving events at: http://localhost:12345/events
Refresh duration: 100ms
Verbose mode: false
Using 8 CPUs
Press Ctrl+C to exit

Making Changes

With Blink running, open another terminal and make some changes to files in the watched directory:

# Create a new file
touch test.txt

# Modify the file
echo "Hello, Blink!" > test.txt

# Remove the file
rm test.txt

If you have verbose mode enabled (blink --verbose), you'll see these events logged in the Blink terminal.

Receiving Events

To receive events from Blink, you need to connect to the event stream. Here are examples in different languages:

curl -N http://localhost:12345/events

const eventSource = new EventSource('http://localhost:12345/events');
eventSource.onmessage = function(event) {
  console.log('File changed:', event.data);
};

import sseclient
import requests

url = 'http://localhost:12345/events'
headers = {'Accept': 'text/event-stream'}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, stream=True)
client = sseclient.SSEClient(response)
for event in client.events():
    print(f"File changed: {event.data}")

package main

import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    resp, err := http.Get("http://localhost:12345/events")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    defer resp.Body.Close()

    scanner := bufio.NewScanner(resp.Body)
    for scanner.Scan() {
        line := scanner.Text()
        if len(line) > 0 && line[:5] == "data:" {
            fmt.Println("File changed:", line[6:])
        }
    }
}

Common Options

Here are some common options you might want to use:

# Watch a specific directory
blink --path /path/to/watch

# Enable verbose logging
blink --verbose

# Use a different port
blink --event-addr :8080

# Only watch specific file types
blink --include "*.js,*.css,*.html"

# Ignore specific directories
blink --exclude "node_modules,dist"

# Send webhooks when files change
blink --webhook-url "https://example.com/webhook"

Next Steps

Now that you've seen the basics of Blink, you can: