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

Question

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

This worked for me

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

Try this....

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