Node Cookbook - Third Edition

Watching directories with chokidar

The fs.watchFile method is slow, CPU intensive, and only watches an individual file.

The fs.watch method is unreliable.

Enter chokidar. The chokidar module wraps the core watching functionality to make it more reliable across platforms, more configurable, and less CPU intensive. It also watches entire directories recursively.

Let's create a new watcher that watches a whole directory tree.

Let's make a new folder, watching-with-chokidar, with a subdirectory called my-folder, which in turn has another subfolder called my-subfolder:

$ mkdir -p watching-with-chokidar/my-folder/my-subfolder 

In our watching-with-chokidar folder, we'll automatically create a new package.json and install dependencies with npm