DispatchSourceWatcher #

A package that provides (limited) file system monitoring using the DispatchSource API on iOS.

Features #

Listen to file system events for directories on iOS. This plugin is meant to bridge a gap that currently exists in the standard library, where watching file system changes on iOS is not currently supported (see flutter issue 99456)

Usage #

The plugin must be initialized before events will fire:

final watcher = DispatchSourceWatcher();
watcher.initialize();

To listen to changes:

void callback1(event) {
  print("receive event on path ${event.path}");
}
watcher.watch("/tmp/dir1", callback1);

To stop listening to changes:

watcher.cancelWatchCallback("/tmp/dir1", callback1);

One should dispose of the watcher when it is no longer needed:

watcher.dispose();

Limitations #

The data provided by the notifications in this package is not very granular. In particular, the callback triggered when the directory hierarchy is modified does not contain the path of the file that was modified (the path in the event is the path of the directory being watched).

Requires iOS 10.0+