chokidar VS fs-extra

A big win recently in the e18e space is that chokidar published a new 4.x version!

I used the Chokidar library to watch for changes in the project directory. Chokidar detects file changes and triggers deployment commands automatically.

We have a file explorer and a terminal, since files or directories could also be modified via terminal we need a way to communicate those changes to frontend. For this I made use of Chokidar, this package lets us setup file system watcher (nodemon also makes use of chokidar) and through following callbacks we can communicate file system changes.

For this, we'll use chokidar - more specifically the chokidar-cli package. chokidar is probably the most useful file watching library for the nodejs ecosystem and it will serve us well.

tailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number

is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.

[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...

The watching magic is really in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar library

> It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.

You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.

Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues

Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change.

So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be revisited later on.

Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.

The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.

OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.

Next, you can use a library like chokidar to listen for changes in your source directory. Create a ws server, and whenever a file changes, send a message.

As another has mentioned, nodemon uses chokidar under the hood for the actual file watching part.

To check if a project uses TypeScript, you could do the same thing that shadcn-ui/ui CLI package does. That is, check if tsconfig.json path exists in the given cwd using pathExists function provided by fs-extra.

fs.readJSONSync reads a JSON file and then parses it into an object. In this case, it is an object of type PackageJson.

I haven't seen fs-extra mentioned yet. For my work it involves a fair bit of reading/writing to the filesystem, so this makes it quite nice to deal with everything in an async way.

There are a number of these modules, https://github.com/jprichardson/node-fs-extra being probably the most famous / popular. It does a better job of explaining the why.

Since updating nodejs@18 and switching to esm only, many libraries have been replaced to support esm import, but fs-extra has not been The use of esm is correctly supported, and no suitable replacement has been found. After the a PR proposed by us was rejected, I decided to re-release a [fs-extra-unified] that correctly supports the use of esm (https://www.npmjs.com/package/fs-extra-unified) module.

Are you seriously suggesting the creators of the software can't write a "save elsewhere" function using Electron and JavaScript? The system has versioning so it would be easy to ask the user to create a backup on first loading with a new version of the software, and the copySync function to make a backup. Foundry uses Node.js already.

We are dealing with a file that is far too large to be loaded into memory at once. Node cannot buffer the file for us because of the size of it.

Implementing those 3 features was quite simple. For metadata and markdown file, I mainly used an external library: showdown to convert from markdown files to html files as well as parsing metadata from markdown files. However, implementing the support for static assets such as images is a bit more interesting. I had to use another external library called fs-extra to copy assets folder from user to the dist folder. I also had to create another new class called CopyFolder where I used fs.copy method to copy assets folder

The zx project implements a shell script executor similar to Bash but using JavaScript modules. It provides an inbuilt asynchronous JavaScript API to call other commands similar to Bash. Besides that, it provides wrapper functions for several Node.js-based command-line helpers such as chalk, minimist, fs-extra, OS, and Readline.