Changes to files on NFS should be detected

[alexeits]

Expected: when a watched JS file on a mounted NFS share changes watchify should detect it
Actual: nothing happens, although any local changes are detected correctly

This functionality worked just fine in 2.1.1. It appears to be a regression in 2.2.1.

Setup details:

• OS X Yosemite host
• Ubuntu trusty guest in VirtualBox managed by Vagrant with synced_folder folder mounted via NFS

[blopker]

I seem to be having this issue as well, but with VMware and Vagrant.

[blopker]

According to paulmillr/chokidar#201, a default setting changed with regard to polling remote drives for changes. Watchify needs to re-enable polling for NFS mounts.

[skinofstars]

Hi, I wanted to add a +1 to this. I seem to be getting the same issue where I am watching files within a vagrant machine that's using NFS. I'm installed from npm using latest.

[skinofstars]

Ok, I tested a bit more and can confirm that patch referenced by greensheep resolves the issue. Is this something that could be merged in? Thanks.

[blopker]

The problem with greensheep@40722d5 is that it won't use native file system events on systems that support it, like non NFS mounts. This is a major performance issue. To fix this correctly we need some way of using polling as a fallback if file system events aren't available.

That or allow us to turn on/off polling explicitly through the Watchify API if we know the file system is NFS.

[skinofstars]

Ok, well we can check if a file/folder is NFS using the stat command, stat -f -c %T foo.js

I'm not sure what system events we're looking for, but I'm happy to do more research. I suspect using stat would be a good enough solution for now though.

Something like

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
exec('stat -f -c %T .', function(err, res){
  console.log(res.replace(/\s+/g, '') === 'nfs');
});

[blopker]

@skinofstars, it's not just NFS mounts that need polling. There's a discussion over at paulmillr/chokidar#242 (what watchify uses to 'watch') to figure out how to auto-detect what method to use. You should put your .02 in! 👍

[zertosh]

Closing and moving the discussion to #162.

[zertosh]

Just published 3.0.0 (see #170), it has the ability to use polling, which will solve your NFS issue.