Yet another nodejs fs.watch implementation that can watch:
This implementation is a wrapper above the inotifywait system command.
Because other implementations:
Are not performant for huge number of directories and files watching. Some are not recursive, other have high CPU usage when watching lot of directories and files.
npm install inotifywait
Prerequisit is to have the inotifywait
command in the current PATH. On debian/ubuntu, you have to sudo apt-get install inotify-tools
add (p1 = filename, stats): received when a file or directory is added
change (p1 = filename, stats): received when a file is modified
unlink (p1 = filename, stats): received when a file or directory is deleted
unknown (p1 = filename, p2 = full raw event object, stats): received when unknown action is done on a file or directory
ready (p1 = unix process object): received when inotifywait is ready to watch files or directories
close (no parameter): received when inotifywait exited
error (p1 = error object): received when an error occures
stats
has two properties, isDir
a Boolean to specify if the event was on a file or a directory and date
a Date object that
holds the date of the occured event.
var INotifyWait = require('inotifywait');
var watch1 = new INotifyWait('/tmp/', { recursive: false });
watch1.on('ready', function (filename) {
console.log('watcher is watching');
});
watch1.on('add', function (filename) {
console.log(filename + ' added');
watch1.close(); // stop watching
});
var watch2 = new INotifyWait('/var/log/', { recursive: true });
watch2.on('change', function (filename) {
console.log(filename + ' changed');
watch2.close(); // stop watching
});
var watch3 = new Inotifywait("/my/dir", {
recursive: true, // recurse sub folders
excludes: ["\./\.git(.*)"], // exclusion regex patterns
files: [".gitignore"], // explicit file paths to ignore
events: ["create", "move", "delete"], // events to listen to
spawnArgs: {stdio: "inherit"}, // spawn args controlling bin spawning
bin: "/home/me/bin/inotifywait" // bin path
});
watch3.on('change', function (filename) {
console.log(filename + ' changed');
watch3.close(); // stop watching
});