sane

I've been driven to insanity by node filesystem watcher wrappers. Sane aims to be fast, small, and reliable file system watcher. It does that by:

• Always use fs.watch (unless polling is forced) and sensibly workaround the various issues with it
• Sane is all JavaScript, no native components
• Stay away from polling because it's very slow and cpu intensive
• Support polling for environments like Vagrant shared directory where there are no native filesystem events

Install

$ npm install sane

If you're using node < v0.10.0 then make sure to start sane with poll: true.

API

sane(dir, globs, options)

Watches a directory and all it's descendant directorys for changes, deletions, and additions on files and directories. Shortcut for new sane.Watcher(dir, {glob: globs, ..options}).

var watcher = sane('path/to/dir', ['**/*.js', '**/*.css']);
watcher.on('ready', function () { console.log('ready') });
watcher.on('change', function (filepath, root, stat) { console.log('file changed', filepath); });
watcher.on('add', function (filepath, root, stat) { console.log('file added', filepath); });
watcher.on('delete', function (filepath, root) { console.log('file deleted', filepath); });
// close
watcher.close();

For options see sane.Watcher.

sane.Watcher(dir, options)

options:

• persistent: boolean indicating that the process shouldn't die while we're watching files.
• glob: a single string glob pattern or an array of them.
• poll: puts the watcher in polling mode. Under the hood that means fs.watchFile.
• interval: indicates how often the files should be polled. (passed to fs.watchFile)

For the glob pattern documentation, see minimatch.

sane.Watcher#close

Stops watching.

sane.Watcher events

Emits the following events:

All events are passed the file/dir path relative to the root directory

• ready when the program is ready to detect events in the directory
• change when a file changes
• add when a file or directory has been added
• delete when a file or directory has been deleted

License

MIT