node-red-contrib-chokidar-watcher

Node-RED node to watch folders using chokidar with awaitWriteFinish support: events fire only after a file has finished being written.

This solves the classic problem of the core watch node (and inotify-based watchers) firing while a file is still being uploaded — e.g. sensors pushing data files over FTP, where you must not process a file until the transfer completes.

Install

From the Node-RED editor: Menu → Manage palette → Install and search for node-red-contrib-chokidar-watcher, or from your Node-RED user directory (typically ~/.node-red):

npm install node-red-contrib-chokidar-watcher

Usage

Drop the chokidar-watcher node into a flow and configure the folder to watch. Every filesystem event emits a message:

{
  "payload": {
    "type": "file",
    "event": "add",
    "path": "/data/incoming/sensor_data.xml",
    "filename": "sensor_data.xml"
  }
}

• type: file or directory
• event: chokidar event (add, change, unlink, addDir, unlinkDir)
• path: full path of the affected file
• filename: basename

Configuration

| Option | Default | Description | |---|---|---| | Folder | — | Path to watch (recursive) | | Persistent | true | Keep the process alive while watching | | Stability threshold (ms) | 2000 | File size must stay constant this long before the event fires (awaitWriteFinish.stabilityThreshold) | | Polling interval (ms) | 100 | File size polling rate while waiting for stability (awaitWriteFinish.pollInterval) |

Initial scan events are ignored (ignoreInitial: true): only changes after deploy are reported.

Notes

• On network filesystems (CIFS/NFS) events may not propagate for writes made from other hosts; writes made through the same mount (e.g. an FTP server in the same pod/container) work fine.

License

MIT