Chokidar

Chokidar is a cross-platform file watching library for Node.js, created and maintained by Paul Miller (paulmillr). It addresses the numerous bugs, inconsistencies, and performance issues that plague the native fs.watch and fs.watchFile APIs across different operating systems, providing a reliable, consistent, and high-performance file watching solution that works identically on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Chokidar has become the de facto standard file watcher in the Node.js ecosystem, used as the underlying watcher by virtually every major build tool and development server including Webpack (via webpack-dev-server), Vite, Rollup, Parcel, Next.js, Gatsby, Nodemon, TypeScript compiler watch mode, Jest watch mode, and thousands of other projects. The name Chokidar comes from the Hindi word for watchman. Key features include: consistent event emission across platforms (add, change, unlink, addDir, unlinkDir, ready, raw, error) regardless of underlying OS implementation; support for glob patterns to watch specific file types while ignoring others; symlink following with configurable depth; polling mode as a fallback for network file systems (NFS, SMB) and virtualized environments (Docker volumes, Vagrant shared folders) where native file system events may not fire correctly; awaitWriteFinish option for detecting when large files have finished being written before emitting the add event; ignored option using glob patterns, regex, or custom functions to exclude paths; persistent watch (keeping the Node.js process alive) or non-persistent mode; ignoreInitial option to skip emitting events for files that exist when watching starts; and atomic write detection for editors that use atomic save (write to temp file, rename). As of 2026, Chokidar has over 11,000 GitHub stars and over 40 million weekly npm downloads.