How to have Emacs save file at multiple locations?

Question

Is there an easy way to have emacs save current buffer in two locations? I could in the 'after-save-hook' programmatically copy the current file to a second location, but writing lisp code for that might take some time.

For those that are curious why I want this: I want the changes I make to my JSP immediately be deployed in tomcat's webapps/myapp directory.

So everytime I save a JSP file I want it saved in both my current version controlled source location as well as in the directory where my Tomcat application is deployed.

I can't use symlinks because I use a windows machine and the destination location is a directory in Linux box that is exported through Samba.

Answer 1

Something like this should work:

(add-hook 'local-write-file-hooks 'my-save-hook)
(defun my-save-hook ()
  "write the file in two places"
  (let ((orig (buffer-file-name)))
    (write-file (concat "/some/other/path" (file-name-nondirectory orig)) nil)
    (write-file orig nil)))

For more on local-write-file-hooks see this answer.

Obviously customize the file name created in the first call to 'write-file.

Answer 2

Given the problem you are trying to solve is to deploy changes immediately, I would suggest writing a script (in your case a batch file) that invokes rsync with the appropriate options. You could either run this in the after-save-hook (which is probably overkill) or assign a hotkey to run it for you when you have made a set of changes that you want to test. Something like:

(global-set-key 'f11 (shell-command "c:/dev/deploy_to_test.bat"))

where the script would look like this:

rsync -avz --del c:/dev/mywebapp z:/srv/tomcat/mywebapp

This is probably better than saving the same file in multiple places, as it ensures the deployment directory always matches what you have in your source repository.