Nodemon watching too many files

Question

I'm confused by nodemon's warning message:

myproject $ nodemon index.js
26 Nov 11:14:31 - [nodemon] v1.2.1
26 Nov 11:14:31 - [nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
26 Nov 11:14:31 - [nodemon] watching: *.*
26 Nov 11:14:31 - [nodemon] starting `node index.js`
26 Nov 11:14:31 - [nodemon] watching 26,084 files - this might cause high cpu usage. To reduce use "--watch".

If I count all the files, i get:

myproject $ find . | wc -l
16628

And vast majority of those files are under .git and node_modules which should be ignored by nodemon anyway. Any idea what could be causing this?

(I'll use --watch for the time being)

Answer 1

I admit I'm a little flummoxed by the file count compared to watch count, but a good option may be to update your nodemon to the recent 1.3.0 release:

npm uninstall -g nodemon
npm cache clean
npm install -g nodemon

The update fixes many bugs and annoyances including ignore rules taking priority over watch rules, and new default options to ignore common directories such as .git and .sass-cache (the old 1.2 version didn't do that very well, if at all.)

Answer 2

If you start nodemon with the --verbose option you will see output similar to this:

...
[nodemon] files triggering change check: .git\index.lock
[nodemon] changes after filters (before/after): 1/0
[nodemon] files triggering change check: .git
[nodemon] changes after filters (before/after): 1/0
[nodemon] files triggering change check: .git
[nodemon] changes after filters (before/after): 1/0
...
[nodemon] files triggering change check: node_modules\jade
[nodemon] changes after filters (before/after): 1/0
...

This output was taken while i was messing with some files in the .git and node_modules folders.In my Gruntfile.js i have set the ignore options for those folders explicitly but you don't have to as it is done by default by nodemon:

//Gruntfile.js excerpt

grunt.initConfig({
...
//configure nodemon
    nodemon: {
        options: {
            ignore: ['.git/', 'node_modules/', etc..],
            ...
            //other options
            ....
         }
     }

So it looks like nodemon keeps track of what's happening in the filesystem, even under the ignored dirs.After some time with nodemon's code i noticed that it establishes file watchers recursively starting at the cwd.
You can see in the output changes after filters (before/after): 1/0 that file changes are checked against the list of ignored directories(that's what the filters' about).If the file is in the watch dirs then nodemon does it's thing (restart, exec option etc..).