Try compiling watchman
If you use Jest or react-native, you’ve probably heard of Facebook’s watchman https://facebook.github.io/watchman/
It’s a file watcher and a dependency of many popular open source projects.So odds are, if you’re reading this, you’ve heard of it before.
Does it work for you?
When I first tried using watchman on my Mac, it just didn’t work very well. 🤔 and my developer friends all had problems. Turns out I found a nice way to fix it for me, and maybe for you too! 🌈 🎇😊
Building watchman
We normally download a default binary for watchman, that is configured for us. We’ll be making our own, and changing one key configuration.
- Official instructions, In case you want to take a look.
Are here: https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/install.html#installing-from-source
- Homebrew
We’ll need homebrew, head over to https://brew.sh and install it, if you haven’t already.
- Uninstall watchman
Remove your current version of watchman, if you have one. With brew you’d do:
brew rm watchman
- Install xcode command line tools
Not needed if you have xcode installed.
xcode-select — install
Accept the popup.
- Install build tools
brew install autoconf automake libtool
Also install git if you don’t have it
brew install git
- Get the files
`cd` to some temporary location, like your desktop.
git clone https://github.com/facebook/watchman.git
cd watchman
git checkout v4.9.0
👆🏻 use a newer release if there is one. Check here: https://github.com/facebook/watchman/releases
Now I’ve had problems with `BASH_ENV` to run this next step, so we’ll unset it. It’ll only affect the current terminal tab, and if you don’t have it set, it’ll do nothing.
unset BASH_ENV
Now let’s run the first script. In the repo folder:
./autogen.sh
Now do a `ls` and look for a `configure` file.
If it’s not there something didn’t work with autogen 😕 You can ask for help in the official issues: https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues
For the next step we’ll configure watchman using the options:
- no python (if you need python support don’t use this flag)
- no pcre (if you need pcre support don’t use this flag)
- state file in our home under `~/.watchman`. This is the big change.
- don’t stop compilation on errors. This is required to compile on some systems, like Mojave and Ubuntu 18.04.
Now run the command below. It’ll print a lot of output.
./configure — without-python — without-pcre — enable-statedir=”$HOME/.watchman” — enable-lenient
If you see output like this in the end, you’re good! 🙌🏻 Your output will be different but it should look similar.
Your build configuration:
CC = gcc
CPPFLAGS = -D_REENTRANT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE
CFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wdeclaration-after-statement -g -gdwarf-2 -fno-omit-frame-pointer
CXX = g++ -std=c++11
CXXFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -g -gdwarf-2 -fno-omit-frame-pointer
LDFLAGS =
prefix: /usr/local
version: 4.9.0
state directory: /Users/Mary/.watchman
Let’s compile. Run:
gmake
This will make your fan spin. Success end of output looks like this:
CXX tests_wildmatch_t-hash.o
CXX tests_wildmatch_t-log.o
CXXLD tests/wildmatch.t
gmake[1]: Leaving directory ‘/Users/Mary/Desktop/watchman’
If you get a fail here, copy the output and open and issue in the repo: https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues
To install, run and type your password.
sudo gmake install
Try using the stuff that depends on watchman normally now and let me know if it’s better! 👾👾
