[feat] Add Watch Files

[kdumontnu]

Describe the problem

I'm setting up Tauri as a front-end for my Rust library. In my src-tauri/Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
...
parser = { path = "../core/my-library" }

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally, tauri config would provide the ability to specify watch glob patterns to automatically rebuild like it does for changes in src-tauri/.

Even better would be if tauri used the top level cargo.toml or src-tauri/cargo.tom to automatically add files to watch.

Alternatives considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[JonasKruckenberg]

You can archive this by editing your build.rs file and adding your crate paths to the change detection list: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/build-scripts.html#change-detection

[FabianLars]

Nope, using the build script doesn't work, at least not with virtual workspaces.

[JonasKruckenberg]

Really? That's weird 🤔

[FabianLars]

Yeah i expected(/hoped) it to work too, but the last time we had this topic i asked other people to test it too, to make sure it's not just me doing it wrong (well, that's still a possibility) 🤷

[lucasfernog]

Our watcher has nothing to do with the build script. But we're not watching every package in a workspace, only tauri folders.

[kdumontnu]

Looks like the ability to watch a folder recursively was only added in the latest Rust version.

I’ll give it a shot.

Update: I tried using rerun-if-changed from build scripts, but I could not get it to work like I wanted. It actually appears it's not intended to do what we're looking for. It seems rerun-if-changed is meant to tell cargo whether or not to (re)run the build script on build (vs using cached builds), NOT whether it should run watch the file/directory while running to rebuild.

Instead, cargo-watch seems to be the tool for this job. I have no idea if this is what Tauri is using to watch directories though.

I apologize if I misunderstand something here, as I'm pretty new to Rust.

Our watcher has nothing to do with the build script. But we're not watching every package in a workspace, only tauri folders.

My goal with this feature request is to add the ability to customize files/directories in the tauri watcher and/or have tauri follow my local cargo dependencies by default.