watchman VS watchfiles?

[ddahan]

Hi Adam,

First, thank for all your work. It helped me a lot!

I used to use Watchman after having read your article about it. I had two issues with it:

• having to build my own arm64 binary for using it on mac m1.
• and now Python 3.10 is not compatible (the fix is not released)

In the meantime, I just found out Watchfiles and your related django-watchfiles package.
I installed it along with django-browser-reload to make Tailwind CSS work with hot reloading.
Everything's great so far.

So the question is: is there any point to keep using watchman rather than Watchfiles with Django?

It not, are you planing to upgrade your blog post and maybe your book too?

Thanks!

[nickmccullum]

@adamchainz I came here with this exact question too! Hoping you can find some time to answer it soon.

[snmishra]

@ddahan and @nickmccullum For whatever reason, Watchman project stopped providing newer builds of pywatchman, although it's buildable from source and works fine.
I build my own at https://github.com/snmishra/docker-pywatchman/ and Docker images are available at https://hub.docker.com/r/snmishra/pywatchman/

[adamchainz]

Watchman seems to be having a bit of a maintenance crisis. The latest comment on the "Python 3.10 support" issue links to a tweet where the (sole?) maintainer at Facebook says they need to get it to pass the internal CI at Facebook: facebook/watchman#970 (comment) . I would also guess that Facebook aren't that interested in Python 3.10 support as they run their own fork of Python 3.8 called Cinder: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3617913/instagram-open-sources-high-performance-python-fork.html

Yes I started django-watchfiles to build an alternative to pywatchman. It's currently alpha level, and I haven't found the time to finish it off. When it's "production ready" and v1.0.0, I will update my books and blog posts accordingly.

Any issues you can find through testing django-watchfiles, or PR's, would be appreciated.

[odigity]

Given that you also happen to be a Django maintainer, seems worth pointing out here that Django currently provides optional support for pywatchman as a more performant alternative to the default stat-based solution, and if pywatchman's got issues, would be nice if Django allowed other solutions - like watchfiles.

BTW - About to go try out watchfiles for the first time after checking out pywatchman and watchdog and seeing too many problems.