Wait-for-path NPM

🚨 Use at your own risk 🚨 I'm not super committed to maintaining this package. If you want the wait-for-path package name please reach out. I would be happy to transfer ownership.

Usage

CLI

npx wait-for-path [path] && echo "Path exists!"

npm install wait-for-path --global

wait-for-path [path] && echo "Path exists!"

Programmatic

npm install wait-for-path

import { waitForPath } from "wait-for-path";

waitForPath("./foo/bar/baz").then(stat => {
  console.log(stat); // fs.Stat object
});

Contributing

How its Implemented

No polling. This library uses the fs.watch API Node.js provides which is an abstraction over inotify(7) on Linux, kqueue(2) and FSEvents on MacOS, and ReadDirectoryChangesW on Windows systems. Read more about it here in the official NodeJS documentation: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/fs.html#fs_caveats. Platforms which do not support the fs.watch API at all will not work with this library. Eventually a fallback polling approach could be implemented for those platforms.

wait-for-path attaches a listener for each segment of the path until it encounters a path segment that does not exist. Whenever any of these watchers reports a change, all watchers are closed, fs.stat is attempted on the full path and if the path still does not exist watchers are added again starting at the root directory.

Development

npm install - to install dependencies.

npm test - to run all tests. CI is setup to run the tests against Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu if you want to do some cross platform testing and don't have access to each OS.

npm run lint - to run the linter.

npm run build:lib - to build the library version of the package.

npm run build:cli - to build the cli version of the package.

npm run build - to build both versions of the package.

Creating Releases

This project has been configured with an automated release process controlled by GitHub actions (the approach is copied almost exactly from Type Route). Anytime a git tag is created through the GitHub releases UI the package will be published with a new version corresponding to the tag created. All pushes to any branch will also automatically be published to NPM and tagged with name of the branch the action was run against.

Future Work

Use something like rollup along with the rollup-dts plugin to ensure only the public API is exposed via tooling to the user (as done in Type Route).
Implement polling fallback mechanism for platforms that don't support the fs.watch API.
Expand API to allow users to cancel the waitForPath promise and clean up any file system watchers.
Setup code coverage reporting.