Watch does not work on linux systems

[jason0518]

Environment details

• OS: Ubuntu (latest at the time of writing this)
• Node.js version: 8.10.0
• npm version: 5.7.1
• @google-cloud/functions-emulator version: 1.0.0-beta.4

Steps to reproduce

1. Run any example/etc project on a linux system.
2. Change a non node_module file in your function
3. The function doesn't restart itself picking up your changes

Possible solution

1. If you change src/supervisor/worker.js#L172 to watch a single file in your project (vs the recursive option) then it works as expected. If you checkout the Node docs there is a caveat for this as the recursive option only works on Mac or Windows.
2. Perhaps using Chokidar to overcome these watch issues would be a good remedy

[ribizli]

I've solved this issue locally with node-watch. Same API call, minimal change:

require('node-watch').(localdir, {
        recursive: true
      }, (event, filename) => {

[dirkjot]

This worked for me, here are full instructions and a fix for @ribizli's small typo:

• Find your @google-cloud directory, probably in your node_modules (see below for Firebase)
• cd functions-emulator
• Add node-watch: npm install --save node-watch
• Edit the file src/supervisor/worker.js
• Around line 180, you will find fs.watch(localdir, {. Replace this with require('node-watch')(localdir, { .

Using Firebase with typescript, all I have to do is run tsc -w in a separate terminal (the watch variant of npm run build). I can now change my source code and the emulator will notice the changes.

If you installed firebase globally, you can find these files by navigating to cd $(npm root -g)/firebase-tools/node_modules/@google-cloud.