How should I format my guard file to watch all files apart from log files?

Question

Guard's really starting to tick me off now. Thought I had a nice regex going to select all files in my project apart from the ones with an extension of 'log':

Guardfile :

   guard :rspec do
      watch(%r{^.+$(?<!\.log)})
   end

Rubular permalink: http://rubular.com/r/qPyeSs54BF

But this results in nothing. I save ANY file, and guard just sits there like a lemon. So annoying.

Same when I do this:

   guard :rspec do
      watch(%r{^.+$})
   end

Rubular permalink: http://rubular.com/r/UxFXyq9lRm

this is what really gets me. As you can see from the rubular links, it's perfectly valid regex, but Guard doesn't listen to it. When can't it just take in regular regex? What's with the stupid %r{} crap? And I wish Guard didn't try to be clever, running individual specs when I tweak them, and then running entire spec files when I tweak those.

Is there some over-arching configuration somewhere where I can set guard to run all specs when any file other than a log file is updated and nothing else? Such a sensible thing to want to do and it's been a complete nightmare.

Here are my Gems:

source ' https://rubygems.org '

group :development do
    gem 'capistrano'
    gem 'guard-rspec'
    gem 'guard-livereload', require: false
    gem 'rb-fsevent'
    gem 'debugger'
end

group :development, :test do
    gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 2.14.0'
    gem 'sqlite3'
end

group :test do
    gem 'factory_girl_rails'
    gem 'capybara', '~> 2.2.0'
    gem 'selenium-webdriver'
    # uses a program called 'libqtwebkit-dev' to build. To install 'libqtwebkit-dev' in Ubuntu, run
    # sudo apt-get install libqtwebkit-dev

#   gem 'capybara-webkit'

    gem 'rb-readline'
    gem 'launchy'
    gem 'database_cleaner'
end

group :production do
    gem 'pg'
end

# standard library
gem 'rails', '4.0.1'
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 4.0.0'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.0.0'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'turbolinks'
gem 'jbuilder', '~> 1.2'

group :doc do
  gem 'sdoc', require: false
end

# custom 
gem 'devise'
gem 'puma'

UPDATE

Maybe this regex is a little better:

.+?\.(?!log).+

http://rubular.com/r/dsYKzUE8FF

So how should I go about implementing this in my guard file?

Answer 1

Short answer: You don't. You tell Guard to pass specific file sets (for lack of a better way to reference regex results) to specific plugins should other specific file sets be modified in any way.

For Guard to "work properly"

1. Guard has to be ALREADY watching the directory the Gemfile is in (although this is platform/adapter specific).
2. The plugin has be designed to respond to the kind of change (modified or added or deleted)
3. The plugin has to be designed to actually handle that file (and not ignore the change)

source: https://github.com/guard/guard/wiki/Understanding-Guard

I recommend anyone interested in using Guard visit the above link.