This project has been deprecated and will no longer receive updates.

Please consider using Watchman and the watch function from webcompiler instead.

A simple cross platform recursive directory watcher for NodeJS, based on fs.watch, but not relying on its recursive option.

I just got tired of gulp.watch and gulp-watch. Because they rely on a hopelessly broken gaze library, which besides being too resource intensive for my liking, also crashes all the time.

Errors happen all the time, we cannot completely prevent them from happening. A good application is the one that handles those errors gracefully instead of dying all the time, producing a long and unreadable error stack that prevents you from seeing what really matters.

Fortunately, NodeJS contains a very handy utility called fs.watch, which is much more performant and less resource intensive, because it uses native operating system events to do it's job.

Unfortunately, though it cannot be reliably used to spy on a whole tree of folders recursively. Which is what this library is for.

npm i simple-recursive-watch --save

To get better acquainted with the available tools feel free to skim through the auto-generated API Docs.

DirectoryWatcher - recursively watches for file changes in a directory

interface DirectoryWatcher {
  constructor(dir: string, type: RegExp, ...exclude: Array<string>);
  start();
  stop();
  static watch(dir: string, extension: string, callback: Function, ...exclude: Array<string>): DirectoryWatcher;
}

1. dir - a full system path to a directory
2. type - a regular expression to match files
3. exclude - files/directories to exclude (not full paths, just file/directory names)
4. extension - a file extension to watch for
5. callback - a callback function to execute whenever a file system change occurs

import {DirectoryWatcher} from 'simple-recursive-watch';
import {join} from 'path';

var libDir = join(__dirname, 'lib');

DirectoryWatcher.watch(libDir, 'js', function () {
  // some JavaScript file, not named "ignoreMe.js" and not residing
  // in a "__tests__" directory, was changed in the "lib" directory
}, '__tests__', 'ignoreMe.js');

The provided callback is invoked, immediately and only once, when somewhere in the src directory a ".js" file is created, edited, renamed, moved around or deleted, excluding those residing in a "__tests__" directory or having a name "ignoreMe.js".

You can specify any number of file or directory names to ignore.