How do I trigger rsync on file modification?

I can sync folders with rsync -avz /directory /target, now I wish to do it if I changed a file in /directory so rsync should be called automatically.

I am using Virtual Box and the shared folder of Virtual Box is really slow, especially if you have a webpage which is using the shared folder as document root. With rsync i would be able to work with my local files on shared folder and sync it automatically with document root.

I hope someone has an idea how to do so,crontab would be not good, because it is executed each x minutes, so if i don't do anything, it will still call rsync but not if I modified my file.

Best regards

Solution 1:

crontab would be not good, cause it is executed each x seconds/minutes, so if i dont do anything, it will still call rsync but not if i modified my file

rsync will only sync the files that have been changed. If nothing has changed, it will exit. That's really a minimal overhead.

If you're unhappy with that you could use inotifywait:

while inotifywait -r /directory/*; do
    rsync -avz /directory /target
done

That will be more instant but it will do things every time you save.

Solution 2:

You could use Lsyncd (Live Syncing Daemon):

Lsyncd watches a local directory trees event monitor interface (inotify or fsevents). It aggregates and combines events for a few seconds and then spawns one (or more) process(es) to synchronize the changes. By default this is rsync. Lsyncd is thus a light-weight live mirror solution that is comparatively easy to install not requiring new filesystems or block devices and does not hamper local filesystem performance.

Here is for example a tutorial for Ubuntu 16.04.