Using Watches

Often we need watches running inside of our containers. This could be for webpack, grunt, nodemon, etc. One of the main challenges with the NFS mounts used in DevTools is that they do not forward filesystem notifications across the NFS mount and into containers, so we need to facilitate that.

There is a command devtools watch [options] <path>. Running this on your host will watch for changes and rsync notifications to files and directories under <path> into the Docker Machine VM (which will then provide filesystem notifications into the container). These are the options for devtools watch

• --machine <name> Optional: Specify a machine to send events. It will default to our dev machine
• --ignorefile <file> Optional: Specify a file that contains patterns for directories/files to ignore. Put one entry per line (blank lines and comments are allowed). If not specified it will look for a file named .devtools-watch-ignore in the working directory and all parent directories.