Watchr provides a normalised API the file watching APIs of different node versions, nested/recursive file and directory watching, and accurate detailed events for file/directory creations, updates, and deletions.
Watchr is made to be a module that other tools include. If you are looking for a command line tool to perform actions when files are changed, check out Watchy.
You install it via npm install watchr and use it via require('watchr').watch(config). Available configuration options are:
path a single path to watchpaths an array of paths to watchlistener a single change listener to fire when a change occurslisteners an array of listeners to fire when a change occurs, overloaded to accept the following values:
changeListener a single change listener[changeListener] an array of change listeners{eventName:eventListener} an object keyed with the event names and valued with a single event listener{eventName:[eventListener]} an object keyed with the event names and valued with an array of event listenersnext (optional, defaults to null) a completion callback to fire once the watchers have been setup, arguments are:
path configuration option: err, watcherInstancepaths configuration option: err, [watcherInstance,...]stat (optional, defaults to null) a file stat object to use for the path, instead of fetching a new oneinterval (optional, defaults to 5007) for systems that poll to detect file changes, how often should it poll in millsecondspersistent (optional, defaults to true) whether or not we should keep the node process alive for as long as files are still being watchedcatchupDelay (optional, defaults to 2000) because swap files delete the original file, then rename a temporary file over-top of the original file, to ensure the change is reported correctly we must have a delay in place that waits until all change events for that file have finished, before starting the detection of what changedpreferredMethods (optional, defaults to ['watch','watchFile']) which order should we prefer our watching methods to be tried?followLinks (optional, defaults to true) follow symlinks, i.e. use stat rather than lstatignorePaths (optional, defaults to false) an array of full paths to ignoreignoreHiddenFiles (optional, defaults to false) whether or not to ignored files which filename starts with a .ignoreCommonPatterns (optional, defaults to true) whether or not to ignore common undesirable file patterns (e.g. .svn, .git, .DS_Store, thumbs.db, etc)ignoreCustomPatterns (optional, defaults to null) any custom ignore patterns that you would also like to ignore along with the common patternsThe following events are available to your via the listeners:
log for debugging, receives the arguments logLevel ,args...error for gracefully listening to error events, receives the arguments err
watching for when watching of the path has completed, receives the arguments err, isWatchingchange for listening to change events, receives the arguments changeType, fullPath, currentStat, previousStat, received arguments will be:
'update', fullPath, currentStat, previousStat'create', fullPath, currentStat, null'delete', fullPath, null, previousStatTo wrap it all together, it would look like this:
// Require
var watchr = require('watchr');
// Watch a directory or file
console.log('Watch our paths');
watchr.watch({
paths: ['path1','path2','path3'],
listeners: {
log: function(logLevel){
console.log('a log message occured:', arguments);
},
error: function(err){
console.log('an error occured:', err);
},
watching: function(err,watcherInstance,isWatching){
if (err) {
console.log("watching the path " + watcherInstance.path + " failed with error", err);
} else {
console.log("watching the path " + watcherInstance.path + " completed");
}
},
change: function(changeType,filePath,fileCurrentStat,filePreviousStat){
console.log('a change event occured:',arguments);
}
},
next: function(err,watchers){
if (err) {
return console.log("watching everything failed with error", err);
} else {
console.log('watching everything completed', watchers);
}
// Close watchers after 60 seconds
setTimeout(function(){
var i;
console.log('Stop watching our paths');
for ( i=0; i<watchers.length; i++ ) {
watchers[i].close();
}
},60*1000);
}
});
You can test the above code snippet by running the following:
npm install -g watchr
watchr
Discover the change history by heading on over to the HISTORY.md file.
Discover how you can contribute by heading on over to the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
These amazing people are maintaining this project:
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These amazing people have contributed code to this project:
Licensed under the incredibly permissive MIT license
Copyright © 2012+ Bevry Pty Ltd us@bevry.me (http://bevry.me)
Copyright © 2011 Benjamin Lupton b@lupton.cc (http://balupton.com)
v2.4.13 2015 February 7
FAQs
Better file system watching for Node.js
The npm package watchr receives a total of 15,943 weekly downloads. As such, watchr popularity was classified as popular.
We found that watchr demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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