watch-fs
v0.0.7
Published
Filesystem watcher
Downloads
326
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Watches your files and folders and gets out of the way
##Quickstart
Watching files in a directory is as simple as instantiating a watcher and handling
events emitted when files get created, changed, or deleted.
Var Watcher = require('watchfs').Watcher;
var watcher = new Watcher({
paths: [ 'path-to-my-dir', 'path-to-my-file', 'etc' ],
filters: {
includeFile: function(name) {
return /\.js/.test(name);
}
});
watcher.on('create', function(name) {
console.log('file ' + name + ' created');
});
watcher.on('change', function(name) {
console.log('file ' + name + ' changed');
});
watcher.on('delete', function(name) {
console.log('file ' + name + ' deleted');
});
watcher.start(function(err) {
console.log('watcher started');
});
Options
The following options can be specified when creating a Watcher object
options.paths
This could be a string or an array containing paths to files or directories.
Any directories specified will be watched recursively unless limited by filtering.
var watcher1 = new Watcher({
paths: '/work/my-project'
});
var watcher2 = new Watcher({
paths: [ '/work/my-other-project', '/work/my-file' ]
});
options.filters
Filters can be used to limit which files or directories are being watched.filters
should be an object containing two functions includeDir
and includeFile
.
Both functions will be called when traversing the file system with the full path of each
file or directory encountered.
The example below will watch the specified folder and will recurse only one folder below
var watcher = new Watcher({
paths: '/work/my-project',
filters: {
includeDir: function(fullPath) {
return /^\/work\/my-project(\/[^/]+)?$/.test(fullPath);
}
}
});
In the next example we're watching only js files and we're skipping .git and node_modules folders
var watcher = new Watcher({
paths: '/work/my-project',
filters: {
includeDir: function(fullPath) {
var skip = /(\.git)|(node_modules)/.test(fullPath);
return !skip;
},
includeFile: function(fullPath) {
return /\.js/.test(fullPath);
}
}
});
Events
create
fired when a file is createdchange
fired when a file is changeddelete
fired when a file is deletedany
fires when any of the above events fire
watcher.on('create', function(name) {
console.log('file ' + name + ' created');
});
watcher.on('any', function(name, type) {
console.log('file ' + name + ' ' + type + 'd');
});
NOTES:
- Not tested on Windows
- Internally it uses fs.watch which could throw an EMFILE error when watching too many files. In those cases ulimit needs to be increased. Use the posix module to increase the ulimit from within a node js process.