watchit

0.0.4 • Public • Published

Watchit

A sensible wrapper around fs.watch.

Written in CoffeeScript by the author of CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development.

Usage

Install with npm. Then:

watchit = require('watchit');
watchit('target', options, callback);

where target is the path to a file or directory, options is a hash (see below) and callback is a function of the form

callback = function(event) { ... }

Both options and callback are optional.

watchit also returns an EventEmitter that emits the same events received by callback (more on that below). You can also call close() on the emitter to "unwatch" the target.

Options

watchit is designed to work as a drop-in replacement for fs.watch by default, but in most cases you'll want to modify one or more of these options:

  • retain (default: false) means that if something is later created at the same location as the target, the new entity will be watched.
  • debounce (default: false) means that changes that occur within 1 second of each other will be treated as a single change. This also allows "echo" events that occur under OS X to be ignored.
  • include (default: false) means that if the target is a directory, files contained in that directory will be treated like targets. (Otherwise, directory events will be forwarded directly from fs.watch.)
  • recurse (default: false) means that if the target is a directory, all of its subdirectories will also be counted as targets.
  • persistent is identical to fs.watch's persistent option. If disabled, the process may exit while files are still being watched.

The emitter

The emitter returned by watchit emits events in two ways:

  1. fs.watch-style: Bind a callback that takes the event name, filename, and possibly other args with emitter.on('all', callback). (Note: With fs.watch, this would be emitter.on 'change'. Unfortunately, 'change' is also one of the two event names that fs.watch can return; to avoid confusion, Watchit uses the 'all' convention from Backbone.js.)
  2. By event: Bind a callback that takes the filename, and possibly other args, to a specific event: 'change', 'create' or 'unlink'. For example, emitter.on('change', callback).

Major differences vs. fs.watch

With Watchit:

  1. Duplicate changes (those that do not modify mtime) are ignored; this works around a notable fs.watch bug under OS X.
  2. After a file is renamed, it will no longer emit events. That is, Watchit does not "follow" moved files the way fs.watch does. (Why? Because this behavior is inconsistent across OSes, and there's currently no way to determine the new location of the file.)
  3. Emitted events differ (see below)

Events

  • 'success'/'failure': When a target is first watched, a 'success' event will be emitted if it already exists, and failure if it does not exist. ('failure' is not emitted if the retain option is set.)
  • 'change': Same as fs.watch's 'change'.
  • 'create': Emitted when the target is created (or, in include mode, when a child of the target directory is created).
  • 'unlink': Emitted when the target no longer exists at its current location (or, in include mode, when a child of the target directory no long exists).

Note that create and unlink are finer-grained versions of fs.watch's rename.

A word of warning

The Node team is, as of version 0.6.2, still working the kinks out of fs.watch. Watchit should be considered a good alternative to dealing with fs.watch yourself, but you may nonetheless encounter some quirks--and even fatal errors. Check the issue tracker:

https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/search?q=fs.watch&state=open

In addition, watchit itself is a new project, and the test suites are incomplete. If you run into any problems that you can replicate in a small test case, please don't hesitate to report them.

Contributing

  • Install dependencies with npm install
  • Make changes in src
  • Build with cake build
  • Add tests under test
  • Run tests via npm test

License

http://trevorburnham.mit-license.org

Readme

Keywords

none

Package Sidebar

Install

npm i watchit

Weekly Downloads

45

Version

0.0.4

License

none

Last publish

Collaborators

  • TrevorBurnham
  • trevorburnham