home-assistant.io/source/_integrations/folder_watcher.markdown

title	description	ha_category	ha_iot_class	ha_config_flow	ha_release	ha_quality_scale	ha_platforms	ha_domain	ha_integration_type
Folder watcher	Integration for monitoring changes within the filesystem.	System monitor	Local Polling	true	0.67	internal	event	folder_watcher	integration

The Folder watcher {% term integration %} 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.

{% include integrations/config_flow.md %}

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:

{% raw %}

#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 }}"

{% endraw %}