One of the things I really loved about Rails in the early days was that it introduced me to the concept of autotest - a script that would watch your file system for changes and then automatically execute your unit tests as soon as you change any file.

Because the unit test suite typically executes quickly, you'd tend to have your test results back within a second or two of hitting save, allowing you to remain in the editor the entire time and only break out the browser for deeper debugging - usually the command line output and OS notifications (growl at the time) would be enough to set you straight.

This was a fantastic way to work, and I wanted to get there again with JavaScript. Turns out it's pretty easy to do this. Because I've used a lot of ruby I'm most comfortable using its ecosystem to achieve this, and as it happens there's a great way to do this already.

Enter Guard

Guard is a simple ruby gem that scans your file system for changes and runs the code of your choice whenever a file you care about is saved. It has a great ecosystem around it which makes automating filesystem-based triggers both simple and powerful. Let's start by making sure we have all the gems we need: