🙋 Replace chokidar with fb-watchman

Choose one: is this a 🐛 bug report or 🙋 feature request?

chokidar only supports native file-system notification for MacOS (a limitation because it relies on fsevents).

watchman provides efficient fs notification for all platforms. Watchaman is used by the react-native bundler, which seems to work pretty well.

[DeMoorJasper]

I’m not sure it’s worth switching as installing watchman to enable the watcher would sort of defy the whole zero-config experience.

On the other side however, we could create a simple adapter in between our watcher code and chokidar and watchman, and switch according to what exactly is installed. If i’m not mistaken, watchman’s node mappings have a function that checks what version is installed. If no watchman is found we could always fallback to chokidar with polling to ensure 100% accuracy, but poor performance. (and add watchman install instructions to docs for optimal performance of the watcher)

I have not experimented enough with watchman to be able to say if it’s even that much better than chokidar in the first place (it might not be worth it)

[AndyOGo]

Hey guys, that’s really annoying with watchman… Basically it is build as a service which you have to install at your OS first. Afterwards you can npm install fb-watchman to get the NodeJS client working, which consumes this service. Really no one wants out-of-npm installs for node apps to be working 😱

Node Sentinel File Watcher NSFW provides proper bindings and is a much better alternative to chokidar 🎉 https://github.com/Axosoft/nsfw/issues/18