Folder watcher

The Folder watcher integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] adds Watchdog file system monitoring.

It creates event entities for these monitored event types:

• closed
• created
• deleted
• modified
• moved

Configured folders must be added to allowlist_external_dirs. Note that by default folder monitoring is recursive, meaning that the contents of sub-folders are also monitored.

Configuration

To add the Folder watcher integration to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

Patterns

Pattern matching using fnmatch can be used to limit filesystem monitoring to only files which match the configured patterns. As example to monitor specific file, as example YAML and text-files add *.yaml and *.txt.

Automations

The attributes the event entities contain are:

• event_type: matching the event_type of the filter (one of created, moved, modified, deleted, closed)
• path: The full path to the file (e.g. “/hello/world.txt”)
• file: The name of the file (e.g. “world.txt”)
• folder: The folder path (e.g. “/hello”)

When the event_type is moved, the file details are for the source file and destination details are included:

• dest_path: The full path to the moved file (e.g. “/hello/world.txt”)
• dest_file: The name of the moved file (e.g. “world.txt”)
• dest_folder: The folder moved path (e.g. “/hello”)

Automations can be triggered on file system events data using a template. The following automation will send a notification with the name and folder of new files added to that folder:

#Send notification for new image (including the image itself)
automation:
  alias: "New file alert"
  triggers:
    - trigger: state
      entity_id: event.created
  actions:
    - action: notify.notify
      data:
        title: New image captured!
        message: "Created {{ trigger.to_state.attributes.file }} in {{ trigger.to_state.attributes.folder }}"
        data:
          file: "{{ trigger.to_state.attributes.file }}"