paulmillr/chokidar

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

12225 stars · 631 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Chokidar is a minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library for Node.js. It normalizes raw fs.watch/fs.watchFile events into reliable add/change/unlink events, supporting atomic writes, chunked writes, filtering, symlinks, and recursive watching.

Use cases

• watch files and directories for changes in nodejs
• trigger build tasks when source files change
• detect when files are added or deleted in a folder
• watch config files and reload on change
• monitor log files for new content
• normalize inconsistent fs.watch events across macos linux and windows

When to choose

• you need reliable cross-platform file change events in Node.js
• raw fs.watch gives duplicate or useless rename events
• you need recursive watching, symlink support, or atomic write handling
• you want a battle-tested library used in millions of repositories

When to avoid

• you need glob-based watch patterns (removed in v4)
• you are on Node.js older than v20 (v5 is ESM-only)
• you need file watching outside the Node.js runtime
• you only need simple polling and want zero dependencies

Facets

library · maturity stable

file-system developer-tools developer-tools files cross-platform cross-platform file-watching fsevents watcher esm npm nodejs

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