Node.JS: Getting error : [nodemon] Internal watch failed: watch ENOSPC

Question

I just installed Node.js on my Ubuntu 14.04 operating system for the first time. I also installed npm. The next step in my installation process was installing nodemon. This all worked out fine.

But, when I run nodemon by typing nodemon app.js in my command line, I get the following error...

[nodemon] 1.8.1 [nodemon] to restart at any time, enterrs[nodemon] watching: *.* [nodemon] startingnode app.js[nodemon] Internal watch failed: watch ENOSPC

In the command line below the error...

alopex@Alopex:~/Desktop/coding_dojo/week-9/javascript/node/testing_node$ Hello World

Why is this happening? Is this normal behavior for nodemon? If not, how can I fix it?

Side notes...

1) app.js is a Javascript file with console.log(111) inside of it.
2) node version is v0.10.25
3) npm version is 1.3.10
4) nodemon version is 1.8.1
5) ubuntu version is...

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
Release:    14.04
Codename:   trusty

Possible duplicate of [Grunt watch error - Waiting...Fatal error: watch ENOSPC](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16748737/grunt-watch-error-waiting-fatal-error-watch-enospc) — Andre Figueiredo, Feb 02 '17 at 14:39

score 565 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 01 '23 at 20:09

565

It appears that my max ports weren't configured correctly. I ran the following code and it worked...

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=582222 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

What this command does is to increase the number of watches allowed for a single user. By the default the number can be low (8192 for example). When nodemon tries to watch large numbers of directories for changes it has to create several watches, which can surpass that limit.

More explanation of how it solves the problem:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 it increase the number of watches of nodemon as you made some changes in your project and
sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p is sysctl command for configure kernel parameters at runtime.
More on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/kernel_parameters

You could also solve this problem by:

sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=582222 && sudo sysctl -p

But the way it was written first will make this change permanent.

edited Sep 01 '23 at 20:09

Vinicius Cardoso

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answered Jan 07 '16 at 20:00

Erik Åsland

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Could someone explain a little more what this does and elaborate on why it could help? – Hinrich Apr 30 '16 at 07:29
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@Hinrich, it is just a guess, i think nodejs watches the file system changes via inotify library. I think there is a limit per user for the max number of watches, which this setting changes to a greater value. – ᐅdevrimbaris May 06 '16 at 07:27
2

@devrimbaris Correct! – Erik Åsland May 19 '16 at 22:17
4

It has just happened to me after going from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04. Your solution worked for me as well. Thank you – Mestre San Jul 26 '16 at 19:45
1

I have to run this every time I restart my machine. Can someone tell me how to avoid running it every time I restart? – Anand Singh Kunwar May 11 '17 at 02:55
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Works on CentOS 7 – chamalabey Sep 06 '17 at 05:27
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Put that on `/etc/sysctl.d/90-override.conf` if you're on Arch – OverCoder Oct 06 '17 at 11:00
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Works on Ubuntu 17.04 – Kunok Oct 31 '17 at 09:47
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Check this https://stackoverflow.com/a/49363821/2157459 if you don't want to mess with system configurations – Ahmed Soliman Mar 19 '18 at 13:11
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Downvote for not providing description what your code mean – Green May 17 '18 at 08:44
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It helps. Ubuntu 18.04, Nodemon. Thank you. – Nhan Nguyen Tri Thanh May 31 '18 at 21:07
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elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki, Nodemon 1.17.5, Node 8.11.2, worked like a charm. Thank you. – Mohammed Essehemy Jun 06 '18 at 13:53
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Works on Ubuntu 17.04 – Tu Duong Jun 19 '18 at 09:09
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sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=582222 && sudo sysctl -p worked for me. Mine is a Linux Mint version OS. – Manu R S Feb 28 '19 at 05:44
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Or just try to close Atom or any other program that watch a lot of files. – Arthur Ronconi Apr 17 '19 at 19:17
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Issue fixed by below command echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p for Ubuntu bydefault limit is set to 8192. We need to increase this. – Sourabh Bhutani May 02 '19 at 08:37
great this solution is working fine for me.......I have got same error but now solved....Thanks! – Vikal Singh Jun 03 '19 at 05:20
1

This does worked for me thank you `sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=582222 && sudo sysctl -p` – Oct 29 '19 at 08:44
Read this if you want very clear explanations of the command https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux#_visual-studio-code-is-unable-to-watch-for-file-changes-in-this-large-workspace-error-enospc – Ebuka Nov 11 '21 at 14:24
This is killer!! – Vinicius Cardoso Dec 18 '21 at 11:19

score 51 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

51

On running node server shows Following Errors and solutions:

nodemon server.js

[nodemon] 1.17.2

[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter rs

[nodemon] watching: .

[nodemon] starting node server.js

[nodemon] Internal watch failed: watch /home/aurum304/jin ENOSPC

sudo pkill -f node

or

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Aug 09 '18 at 05:33

Mani Abi Anand

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Be careful with the 'sudo pkill -f node' command. It force kills all running node applications. Some apps (e.g. Atom, vscode) depend on node and therefore this command could potentially crash those apps and you could lose work. Also it is not guaranteed to have effect anyway. Second one is better. – Tafel Jun 02 '21 at 08:42

score 33 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 30 '18 at 09:26

33

Erik, You can just kill all the other node processes by

pkill -f node

and then restart your server again. It'll work just fine then.

answered Jul 30 '18 at 09:26

pawanpandey392

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Downvote because this also caused my Visual Studio Code windows to freeze. – LexH May 22 '19 at 21:53
this was working like a charm...until now! Now its ineffective, getting same error. – kestrel Jun 05 '20 at 17:31
If you have multiple things running with node, this will cause them all to stop. This is especially troublesome if you have both a client and server running. – Paul J Sep 30 '20 at 05:58
This isn't an answer, this is a comment – Hugo Cox Jan 02 '22 at 22:51
This is useful only to run in a isolate environment like dedicated node docker – Máxima Alekz Mar 14 '22 at 19:32

score 25 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 06 '16 at 18:14

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As per discussion over here, ENOSPC means Error No more hard-disk space available. Reason why this much memory required by nodemon or gulp-nodemon (in my case) is that it was watching contents of a folder which it shouldn't. To fix that nodemon has ignore setting that can be used to tell nodemon what not to watch. Have a look at nodemon sample config here.

answered Sep 06 '16 at 18:14

Zubair Alam

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Good job, this is the root cause. – lutaoact Feb 22 '18 at 13:24
This was the reason for me. Spot on explanation of ENOSPC. Thank you. – Amit Jun 24 '21 at 15:07

score 16 · Answer 5 · edited Jul 18 '18 at 18:41

16

[nodemon] Internal watch failed: watch /home/Document/nmmExpressServer/bin ENOSPC
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! nmmexpressserver@0.0.0 start: `nodemon ./bin/www`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the nmmexpressserver@0.0.0 start script.

This is the error I got when running nodemon ./bin/www.

The solution was closing an Atom window that had a entire directory of folders open in the project window.

I don't know why, but I'm assuming Atom and nodemon use similar processes to watch files/folders.

edited Jul 18 '18 at 18:41

divinedragon

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answered Mar 25 '18 at 03:58

codeinaire

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That was exactly my problem. I happeed to launch atom from the project's install directory. I closed atom, launched it from a different dir and the problem went away. – Ya. Jul 22 '18 at 19:16
In my case, the same was happening on Sublime in Ubuntu. When I closed the IDE, I could run it properly. Any tips about it? – Shad Sep 20 '18 at 19:42
I've not tried to replicate it to see if it has been fixed. – codeinaire Sep 21 '18 at 23:30
Thanks. Mine can work after I close Gitkraken. This is a strange problem. So that means we can not have two processes monitoring the same folder? – Zhang LongQI Nov 09 '18 at 09:21
It was Nextcloud client here - that uses a ton of inotify watches. Thanks, y'all! – Bill McGonigle Nov 23 '18 at 00:49
At my is case was sublime editor running. I closed it and everything works fine. – Marcelo Rebouças Jun 08 '20 at 22:47

Ahmed Soliman · Answer 6 · 2018-03-19T13:16:01.663

Add a nodemon.json configuration file in your root folder and specify ignore patterns for example:

nodemon.json

{
  "ignore": [
    "*.test.js", 
    "dist/*"
  ]
}

Note that by default .git, node_modules, bower_components, .nyc_output, coverage and .sass-cache are ignored so you don't need to add them to your configuration.

Explanation: This error happens because you exceeded the max number of watchers allowed by your system (i.e. nodemon has no more disk space to watch all the files - which probably means you are watching not important files). So you ignore non-important files that you don't care about changes in them for example the build output or the test cases.

score 6 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 05 '19 at 15:34

6

in my case closing the visual studio code then starting the server did the trick

Operating system - ubuntu 16.4 lts

node.js version - 8.11.1

npm version - 6.0.0

answered Mar 05 '19 at 15:34

Vishal Verma

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It seems that he was not using visual studio. – Julien Revault d'A... Mar 05 '19 at 15:52
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Although this doesn't directly answer the question (because the question doesn't involve VS Code), this did solve my problem. – Chasen Bettinger Aug 12 '19 at 19:01
Thanks, just simple, It solved my problem :) – Nicolas Dec 15 '21 at 12:40

score 4 · Answer 8 · answered Mar 10 '18 at 00:51

4

Instead of specifying a list of directories to ignore (e.g. negative), you can also specify a list of directories to watch (e.g positive):

nodemon --watch dir1 --watch dir2  dir1/examples/index.js

In my particular case, I had one directory I wanted to watch and about nine I wanted to ignore, so specifying '--watch' was much simpler than specifying '--ignore'

answered Mar 10 '18 at 00:51

vt5491

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Thanks, my nodemon was restarting multiple times in a docker container and taking forever to reload the server. Added the watch for my src folder and it's lightning fast. – Devin Fields Nov 15 '21 at 06:26

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 25 '21 at 14:19

There must be a better way of solving this, than what I suggest. I hope some experts land on this page. Also note that I was working on a development server and thus could afford to kill all processes of node. This may not be what you want.

I followed the answer of @zubair-alam and got it fixed for the first time. I added the "ignore" to the package.json (Even though the referred link says it is the default).

 ........ Before
  "ignore": [
    ".git",
    "node_modules/**/node_modules"
  ],
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "start": "nodemon ./index.js --exec babel-node -e js"
  },
 ........ After

However the error returned again as soon as I added a new file to the folder. I was working on Linux, so I basically killed all process related to node, by saying the following.

killall node

and then restarted npm by saying. The server started without errors.

npm start

You will have to change the killall command using a command specific to your operating system. See this discussion.

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered Jul 16 '17 at 10:59

I had the same error, but in Ubuntu 14.04 inside Windows 10 (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows). All I did to overcome the error was to update the Creators update, which then allowed me to install 16.04 version of Ubuntu bash and then after installing newest version of node (by this steps) I installed also the newest version of npm and then the nodemon started to work properly.

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Jan 11 '21 at 14:52

1

Try reopening VS code or Atom with more specific directory where your app.js is present. I had a lot of folders opened and this problem occured. But once I opened my specific folder and tried once again, it worked.

answered Jan 11 '21 at 14:52

Debabrata Bhakat

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Node.JS: Getting error : [nodemon] Internal watch failed: watch ENOSPC

11 Answers11

On running node server shows Following Errors and solutions:

[nodemon] Internal watch failed: watch /home/aurum304/jin ENOSPC

or

Linked