chokidar VS nvm

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...

> 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.

At the end of the day, ironically, Nodemon does not even implement file watching functionality. It is a thin wrapper around chokidar (see source code), and the way it is being used is neither efficient (CPU and your battery usage) or performant. So it is not a false argument, just perhaps not the most appealing.

for file watching, it might use something similar to https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar

First, we need to install chokidar to enable watching and automatically refreshing our files.

The Parcel build command doesn’t support a watch mode like Jest does, but I’d recommend checking out the chokidar package for some help building your own live reload pipeline.

To start, we’re going to use chokidar to watch our file system for changes, so that we can reload when we update a view or a CSS file, not just JavaScript files.

Back when Orthodox File Managers were created, that was the whole list. Nowadays all operating systems have some sort of functionality of letting apps "watch" filesystem for changes, so it would just need to register that it's interested in some files or directories, and then it would receive a callback when that happens. Every operating system does it differently, and there are many gotchas and performance considerations, but a library like chokidar handles most of such issues already.

Node.js + Nvm - runtime for javascript without a browser

Install Node.js if it hasn't been installed. There are several ways to install Node.js. You may download the installer from the official website, or install it with tools like NVM. After installation, run this command to verify its installation.

Our server also needs Node.js to run our app. We could install the binary directly, but I prefer to use a tool called NVM, which allows us to easily manage Node versions. We can install it with this command:

By setting up your environment in isolation, you can prevent yourself from a lot of issues when experimenting with code. It makes your code behave more predictable due to the defined state of the runtime environment you are working with. This article should provide you with enough information to get started, but obviously, there is a lot more power embedded in NVM, Virtual Environment and RBEnv. So make sure to check their documentation.

I highly recommend setting up nodejs with a version manager, nvm was and still is a popular option, however, I now recommend and have been using fnm, a simpler and faster alternative to manage my nodejs versions.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

I usually develop on Windows so I installed NVM for Windows from here, but if you’re on other OS I’m sure you can find a version that supports it, probably this is the answer.

in order to install Node on your Linux environment. Next up is NVM. I suggest going to https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm and getting the latest install script from there. The current download is:

You can find the script to install nvm on their GitHub repository.