Reporter

File change report generator for macOS and Linux a with built-in mailer

Overview

Reporter is a lightweight command line utility that generates email reports showing all file system changes since the last run. It is intended to pair with self-hosted file shares and network attached storage to improve visibility of file changes with minimum cognitive overhead.

Most other change detection tools I've been able to find appear to be focused on integrity checks or more complaince-focused auditing. Conversely, my goal with Reporter is to create something that's easy to configure and offers more consumer-style reports—the sort of thing you might get from Dropbox or other centralized file sync services.

Installation

Debian and Ubuntu

There are currently pre-built amd64 and arm64 binaries for Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat), 25.10 (Questing Quokka), and Debian 13 (Trixie).

curl -fsSL https://releases.jbmorley.co.uk/apt/public.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/jbmorley.gpg
echo "deb https://releases.jbmorley.co.uk/apt $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jbmorley.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install reporter

macOS

Download the latest release.

Configuration

Settings are stored in ~/.config/reporter/config.json. Mine looks something like this:

{
    "mailServer": {

        "host": "smtp.example.org",
        "port": 587,
        "username": "username",
        "password": "password",

        "domain": "server.example.org",
        "timeout": 30,

    },

    "email": {

        "from": {
            "address": "server@example.org",
            "name": "My Server"
        },

        "to": [
            {
                "address": "admin@example.org",
                "name": "Example.org Admin"
            }
        ]

    }

    "folders": {
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Audiobooks": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Books": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Downloads": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Magazines": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Manuals": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Notes": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Paperwork": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Pictures": {},
        "/mnt/usb0/Storage/Software": {}
    }

}

Schedule

Reporter does not currently provide built-in support for scheduling checks, instead deferring to external task runners like cron.

For example, my current configuration uses cron to schedule builds at 3am every morning:

0 3 * * * /home/jbmorley/Projects/reporter/.build/release/reporter scan

N.B. Depending on your server's mail configuration, you might want to use something like cronic to quiet the output and stop cron sending mails unless there's an error.

Development

Dependencies

Reporter is written in Swift. Swiftly is the recommended mechanism to install the Swift toolchain.

git clone git@github.com:inseven/reporter.git
cd reporter
git submodule update --init --recursive
mise install

Debian

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Build

scripts/build.sh

Under the hood, this runs swift test, swift build, and swift build -c release.

Run

Use the swift compiler:

swift run reporter scan

Or run the result of build.sh (above) directly:

.build/release/reporter scan