react-scripts start should support CI=true, watchAll=false etc.

[blmoore]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

I'm running react-scripts start in a CI environment in order to run cypress end-to-end tests. As the project has grown this has started hitting the inotify.max_user_instances kernel limit which cannot be configured from within a container, this is reported as:

events.js:183
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: watch /path/to/somewhere ENOSPC
    at FSWatcher.start (fs.js:1382:19)
    at Object.fs.watch (fs.js:1408:11)
    at createFsWatchInstance (/path/to/somewhere

Describe the solution you'd like

react-scripts start should support flags already used with react-scripts test that turn off webpack's file watching, these include env var CI and commandline flags --watchAll=false

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could use my production express server or something else to serve these files, but these aren't dependencies of the app whereas it's already using webpack-dev-server with configurable watch options.

[jiaming10]

I have a similar-but-not-too-similar use case. I'm currently running VSCode Remote Containers, and react-scripts start will hit inotify.max_user_instances in the container I'm using.

I can get around this is by setting the parameter on my host, or another way to get around is to spin up another docker(nginx, apache, etc..).

So yeah, an option to disable watching node_modules/ will be good.

[TeknoFiend]

+1

The Advanced Config docs make it seem that CI=true is supported tho they don't mention start explicitly: https://create-react-app.dev/docs/advanced-configuration/

[iseki0]

+1 I use devServer for cypress test server. It can't running in CI becausee of this problem.

[ericj79]

+1 I would also appreciate this feature. I am surprised the CI environment variable does not apply to the start command already.

[ryepup]

This feature would likely resolve cypress-io/github-action#357

A workaround is to set the the CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING environment variable to 1. This will still pointlessly watch for file changes and burn up CI minutes, but it uses a different code path that avoids the ENOSPC error

[curtdept]

Hitting this with cypress, start ignores --watchAll and CI

[amberisvibin]

+1 This would be very nice, I've hit the inotify.max_user_instances limit as well. Increasing the limit worked, but wasn't ideal in the least.
I ended up fixing this in Webpack by adding a webpack.config.js file with the following:

module.exports = {
  watchOptions: {
    ignored: /node_modules/,
  },
};

This prevents webpack from watching every file in the node_modules directory. It would be appreciated if this was an option in create-react-app.