What is @ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog?
@ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog is a package designed to enhance the stability and reliability of CKEditor 5 by providing mechanisms to monitor and automatically recover from editor crashes. It ensures that the editor remains operational even in the face of unexpected errors.
What are @ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog's main functionalities?
Editor Watchdog
The Editor Watchdog monitors a single CKEditor 5 instance and automatically restarts it in case of a crash. This ensures that the editor remains available to the user.
const { EditorWatchdog } = require('@ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog');
const ClassicEditor = require('@ckeditor/ckeditor5-editor-classic/src/classiceditor');
const watchdog = new EditorWatchdog(ClassicEditor);
watchdog.create(document.querySelector('#editor'), {
// Editor configuration.
}).catch(error => {
console.error('Error initializing the editor:', error);
});
Context Watchdog
The Context Watchdog monitors a CKEditor 5 context, which can include multiple editor instances. It ensures that all editors within the context are restarted in case of a crash, maintaining the overall stability of the editing environment.
const { ContextWatchdog } = require('@ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog');
const Context = require('@ckeditor/ckeditor5-core/src/context');
const watchdog = new ContextWatchdog(Context);
watchdog.create({
// Context configuration.
}).then(context => {
// Create editors within the context.
}).catch(error => {
console.error('Error initializing the context:', error);
});
Other packages similar to @ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog
react-error-boundary
react-error-boundary provides a reusable component for handling JavaScript errors in React components. It offers a way to catch errors in the component tree and display a fallback UI. While it is not specific to CKEditor, it serves a similar purpose of enhancing application stability by managing errors gracefully.
redux-saga
redux-saga is a library that aims to make application side effects (e.g., asynchronous actions) easier to manage, more efficient to execute, and better at handling failures. It provides mechanisms to handle errors and retries, which can be compared to the watchdog functionality in terms of ensuring application robustness.
raven-js
raven-js is the official browser JavaScript client for Sentry, a real-time crash reporting system. It captures and reports errors in web applications, providing insights into crashes and helping developers to fix issues. Similar to @ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog, it focuses on monitoring and recovering from errors.
CKEditor 5 watchdog feature

This package implements the watchdog feature for CKEditor 5. It keeps a CKEditor 5 rich-text editor instance running.
Installation
This plugin is part of the ckeditor5
package. Install the whole package to use it.
npm install ckeditor5
Create free account
If you want to check full CKEditor 5 capabilities, sign up for a free non-commitment 14-day trial.
Documentation
See the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-watchdog
package page as well as the Watchdog feature guide in CKEditor 5 documentation.
License
Licensed under a dual-license model, this software is available under:
For more information, see: https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-licensing-options.
44.2.0 (February 12, 2025)
We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 5 v44.2.0.
Release Highlights
🖥️ Enhanced Source Code Editing (⭐)
Introducing new premium feature: Enhanced Source Code Editing. It displays the source code in a dialog and is compatible with all editor types. It offers syntax highlighting, code completion, code folding, and other advanced functionalities. Additionally, it supports both HTML and Markdown formats.
📤 Uploadcare and image optimizer (⭐)
We have integrated the Uploadcare image manager service, enabling you to upload and edit images to their cloud environment. You can upload files from various sources, including local devices, social media, or online drives ensuring rapid uploads. The integration takes care of efficient media delivery with responsive images mechanism, making sure your users will save bandwidth and have faster website loading. You can also optimize images with the built-in image editor which offers a range of features, such as cropping, rotating, flipping, photo filters and more. All this directly from the editor, try it out!
🖼️ Image Merge Fields (⭐)
Image merge fields are a new type of merge fields, dedicated for image placeholders. They maintain all standard image interactions, like styling, resizing or captions (in which you can use merge fields too!) At the same time, they keep all merge fields functionalities, like data previews or document export integration. In the document data, image merge fields are represented like other images, however their src
attribute is set to a respective merge field, for example, src="{{CompanyLogo}}"
, making them easy to post-process!
📝 Track Changes Preview (⭐)
We have added the preview mode that displays a document with all suggestions accepted. Accessible from the track changes dropdown, this modal preview helps check the final content without extensive markers.
😀 Emoji support
They are here! 🎉 🥳 🎊 Insert emojis effortlessly in the editor by typing :
or through a user-friendly emoji picker. This feature enhances the richness of your content by allowing quick access to a wide range of emojis.
⚡ Performance improvements: Part 4
Here comes the final batch of the planned performance improvements in the editor loading speed area, that we worked on through a couple of past releases.
- A new caching mechanism in
Mapper
now handles model-to-view mappings, substantially improving performance for loading and saving data.
- Images with specified height and width automatically use
[loading="lazy"]
in the editing area, optimizing the loading time (read more on MDN). This attribute is only applied during editing to enhance the loading efficiency of images, and it does not reflect in the final data output.
We are greatly satisfied with the improved editor loading times. At the same time, we acknowledge some other problematic areas, and we will keep delivering more performance-related improvements in the future.