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.
• Takes care of WinAPI's ReadDirectoryChangesW double reporting.

Usage

Command line

Usage:
  simple-watcher path1 [path2 path3 ...] [--shallow]

JavaScript

const watch = require('simple-watcher')

// No frills deep watching over a directory.
watch('/path/to/foo', filePath => {
  console.log(`Changed: ${filePath}`)
})

// Shallow watching over multiple directories.
watch(['/path/to/foo', '/path/to/bar'], {shallow: true}, filePath => {
  console.log(`Changed: ${filePath}`)
})

Caveats

When watching over files rather than directories, the fs.watchFile() is used. This is to provide a polling fallback in cases where directory watching is problematic (e.g. Docker).