webpack --watch exits after building once

Question

I was using webpack --watch statement to run my webpack in watch mode for building my ReactJS app. However for some reason, it stopped working now. It now just

Answer 1

The problem seems to have arose because of the inotify watch limit

Listen uses inotify by default on Linux to monitor directories for changes. It's not uncommon to encounter a system limit on the number of files you can monitor.

The current watch limit can be seen through the command

$ cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

In my case it was 8192 which is the default value for linux X64 systems

To change it temporarily we need to run the following commands

$ sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
$ sudo sysctl -p

For permanently setting it we should run run

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

Answer 2

This happen mostly because it watches the node_modules folder and exceeds the limit. In this case, rather than modifying the host system, use:

  watchOptions: {
    aggregateTimeout: 300,
    poll: 1000,
    ignored: /node_modules/
  }

to the webpack.config.js exports.