simple-watcher

Simple Watcher

A simple recursive directory watcher.

But why?

I know there's plenty of them out there, but most don't seem to care about the recursive option of Node's fs.watch(), which significantly improves performance on the supported platforms, especially for large directories.

Features:

• Dead simple and dead lightweight.
• No dependencies.
• Leverages the recursive options on OS X and Windows; uses a fallback for other platforms.
• Does not care about Windows reporting multiple changes for one file (a simple workaround for this below).

Usage

Basic example:

const watch = require('simple-watcher')

watch('/path/to/directory', (filePath) => {
  console.log(`Changed: ${filePath}`)
})

WinAPI's ReadDirectoryChangesW double reporting fix:

const watch = require('simple-watcher')

let last = { filePath: null, timestamp: null }
let delta = 300 // Adjust if needed.

watch('/path/to/directory', (filePath) => {

  // Skip if the last change within the delta time was the same.
  let now = Date.now()
  if (filePath === last.fileName && now - last.timestamp < delta) {
    return
  }

  // Save the change.
  last.filePath = filePath
  last.timestamp = now

  console.log(`Changed: ${filePath}`)
})