Wait for Path

This is a fork of aleclarson/wait-for-path to update dependencies and do the occasional fix. This package is ESM only.

Efficiently wait for a path to exist (cross-platform)

Usage

Programmatic

npm install @lekoarts/wait-for-path

import { waitForPath } from '@lekoarts/wait-for-path'

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

How it's 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.