fsevents
Native access to MacOS FSEvents in Node.js
The FSEvents API in MacOS allows applications to register for notifications of
changes to a given directory tree. It is a very fast and lightweight alternative
to kqueue.
This is a low-level library. For a cross-platform file watching module that
uses fsevents, check out Chokidar.
Installation
Supports only Node.js v8.16 and higher.
npm install fsevents
Usage
const fsevents = require('fsevents');
const stop = fsevents.watch(__dirname, (path, flags, id) => {
const info = fsevents.getInfo(path, flags, id);
});
stop();
The callback passed as the second parameter to .watch
get's called whenever the operating system detects a
a change in the file system. It takes three arguments:
fsevents.watch(dirname: string, (path: string, flags: number, id: string) => void): () => Promise<undefined>
path: string
- the item in the filesystem that have been changedflags: number
- a numeric value describing what the change wasid: string
- an unique-id identifying this specific event
Returns closer callback which when called returns a Promise resolving when the watcher process has been shut down.
fsevents.getInfo(path: string, flags: number, id: string): FsEventInfo
The getInfo
function takes the path
, flags
and id
arguments and converts those parameters into a structure
that is easier to digest to determine what the change was.
The FsEventsInfo
has the following shape:
{
"event": "created",
"path": "file.txt",
"type": "file",
"changes": {
"inode": true,
"finder": false,
"access": false,
"xattrs": false
},
"flags": 0x100000000
}
Changelog
- v2.3 supports Apple Silicon ARM CPUs
- v2 supports node 8.16+ and reduces package size massively
- v1.2.8 supports node 6+
- v1.2.7 supports node 4+
Troubleshooting
- I'm getting
EBADPLATFORM
Unsupported platform for fsevents
error. - It's fine, nothing is broken. fsevents is macos-only. Other platforms are skipped. If you want to hide this warning, report a bug to NPM bugtracker asking them to hide ebadplatform warnings by default.
License
The MIT License Copyright (C) 2010-2020 by Philipp Dunkel, Ben Noordhuis, Elan Shankar, Paul Miller — see LICENSE file.
Visit our GitHub page and NPM Page