HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
meta
watchman
C++2013–2026
meta / watchman

watchman

Watches files and records, or triggers actions, when they change.

11Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
13.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Watches files and records, or triggers actions, when they change.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-07-20 19:48:26 UTC to 2026-04-24 01:34:28 UTC.

0122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

11 sources
Very neat! I like this a lot, nice work. After peeking the source, a few possible areas of improvement: - You can use `fstat` and keep a file handle around, likely further improving performance (well, reducing the performance hit to other users of the filesystem by not resolving vfs nodes). If you do this, you'll have to check for file deletions. - If you do stick with stat(2), it might be a good idea to track the inode number from the stat result in addition to the time,size tuple. That handles the "t,s = 1,2; honker gets SIGSTOPped/CRIU'd; database file replaced; honker started again", as well as renameat/symlink-swap fiddling. Changing inode probably should just trigger a crash. - Also check the device number from the stat call. It sounds fringe, but the number of weird hellbugs I've dealt with in my career caused by code continually i
Read the rest
nteracting with a file at the same time as something else mounted an equivalent path "over" the directory the file was originally in is nonzero. - It's been a few years since I fought with this, but aren't there edge cases here if the system clock goes backwards? IIRC the inode timestamp isn't monotonic--right? There are various strategies for detecting clock adjustment, of various reliability, that you could use here, if so. Just checking if the mtime-vs-system-clock diff is negative is a start. That covers the more common of the "vanishingly uncommon but I've still seen 'em" cases related to file modification detection. Whether you choose to cope with people messing with the file via utime(2) is up to you (past a point, it feels like coping with malicious misuse rather than edge cases). But since your code runs in a loop, you're well-positioned to do that (and detect drift/manipulations of the system clock): track a monotonic clock and use it to approximate the elapsed wall time between honker poller ticks (say it fast with an accent, and you get https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-11465127); if the timestamp reported by (f)stat(2) ever doesn't advance at the same rate, fall back to checksumming the file, or crashing or something. But this is well into the realm of abject paranoia by now. It's been a decade or so since I worked in this area, so some of that knowledge is likely stale; you probably know a lot more than I do after developing this library even before considering how out-of-date my knowledge might be. When I worked on this stuff, I remember that statx(2) was going to solve all the problems any day now, and then didn't. More relevant, I also remember that the lsyncd (https://github.com/lsyncd/lsyncd) and watchman (https://github.com/facebook/watchman) codebases were really good sources of "what didn't I think of" information in this area. But seriously, again, nice work! Those are nitpicks; this is awesome as-is!
In Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite
You might be interested in how this problem was solved by our team at Meta, in EdenFS (https://github.com/facebook/sapling/blob/main/eden/fs/docs/O...) and Watchman: https://github.com/facebook/watchman. What you're describing is reasonably similar to EdenFS, except EdenFS runs in userspace. Watchman layers a consistent view of file metadata on top of inotify (etc), as well as providing stateless queries on top of EdenFS. It acts as a unified interface over regular filesystems as well as Eden that provides file lstat info and hashes over a Unix domain socket. Back in the day, Watchman sped up status queries by over 5x for a repo with hundreds of thousands of files: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-infra/scaling-mer... I worked directly on this and co-wrote this blog post. In truth, getting these two components working to the sta
Read the rest
ndard expected by developers was a very difficult systems problem with a ton of event ordering and cache invalidation concerns. (With EdenFS, in particular, I believe there was machine learning involved to detect prefetch patterns.) For smaller repos, it is much simpler to do linear scans. Since it is really fast on modern hardware anyway, it is also the right thing to do, following the maxim of doing the simplest thing that works.
In Jujutsu for everyone
It's a bit of a magic trick. A "snapshot" is taken any time a command is run, and it happens implicitly before any actual algorithms or code for a given command is run (massively simplifying the internal design), so for all intents and purposes it's "automatic" from the user interface e.g. even checking repo status or otherwise small operations will cause a snapshot. But you can integrate with https://github.com/facebook/watchman/ in order to have a truly daemon-ified option where any filesystem write will cause a snapshot to be taken.
In Steve's Jujutsu Tutorial
valty·May 29, 2024Submission

Ask HN: Best file watcher for Node.js/Bun

I liked the idea of Facebook's watchman. Cross-platform and it would only add a watcher on each dir once, regardless of how many apps needed watcher functionality. But it's currently uninstallable for weeks on macOS without some pain (https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues/1199). There is `rs-notify` and `watchexec` that builds on that but seems a bit unstable. It's 2024, and we still don't have a good way to reliably watch a large number of files :( The bit rot is pretty crazy. Watchman's decline was a bit shocking.
2 points · Open discussion
How about `git status`? The first SSD I bought back in 2008 was to put a large git repo on it; it helped. With much larger repos, like those I had to work with at Facebook, even an NVMe drive becomes a bit uncomfortable, and one has to use something like Watchman [1] to track changes without a rather noticeable delay. [1]: https://github.com/facebook/watchman
In What comes after Git
At a previous job I migrated a quite large code base to git. IIRC it was at least 500k files and a couple of 10MLOCs. We had the same "scaling" issues Facebook mentioned here when trying to place all of this inside one repository. So we ended up going with submodules for this. Another idea was to perhaps enable re-use of repositories and/or disconnect old legacy code this way. We did took a quick look at Mercurial but since lots of the upstream tools we used was using Git (linux, uboot, yocto, etc) it was an obvious choice. I seem to recall there being two hg extension that where of interest at the time (2010-ish), one to add inotify support and another to store large files outside the repository (hg-largefiles?). Seem like Facebook's approach to the lstat(2) issue with watchman [1] is to use inotify on Linux. This has been discussed a co
Read the rest
uple of times for git as well but nothing has come of it so far [2]. [1] https://github.com/facebook/watchman [2] http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/inotify-to-minimize-stat-cal...
In Scaling Mercurial at Facebook

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.