Asimov

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.<br>— Issac Asimov

For macOS users, Time Machine is a no-frills, set-it-and-forget-it solution for on-site backups. Plug in an external hard drive (or configure a network storage drive), and your Mac's files are backed up.

For the average consumer, Time Machine is an excellent choice, especially considering many Mac owners may only have Time Machine as a backup strategy. For developers, however, Time Machine presents a problem: how do I keep project dependencies from taking up space on my Time Machine drive?

Asimov aims to solve that problem, scanning your filesystem for known dependency directories (e.g. node_modules/ living adjacent to a package.json file) and excluding them from Time Machine backups. After all, why eat up space on your backup drive for something you could easily restore via npm install?

Installation

Asimov may be installed in a few different ways:

Installation via Homebrew

The easiest way to install Asimov is through Homebrew:

 brew install asimov

If you would prefer to use the latest development release, you may append the --head flag:

 brew install asimov --head

Once installed, you may instruct Homebrew to automatically load the scheduled job, ensuring Asimov is being run automatically every day: