recursive watch ignoring changes beyond certain depth about watchfiles HOT 6 CLOSED

Also seeing this
Watching /usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/<project namespace>

Python 3.12
Watchfiles 0.21.0

from watchfiles.

@m3talstorm what will be because site-packages is specifically ignored.

from watchfiles.

sorry i am confused. i didn't ask the program to ignore site-packages. is this something built-in? i am interested in changes under site-packages as sometimes i make changes directly to packages in there to test stuff.

from watchfiles.

is this documented somewhere? i found it now in watchfiles/filters.py. i understand the idea behind sensible defaults, but is there a way for me to turn this off without editing the code?

from watchfiles.

I agree we should probably:

1. Remove this from the list
2. Document it better
3. Document how to change it - I think just pass None or you're own method to filter - I'm afk right now so can't check

from watchfiles.

thank you for looking into this. a bit more context:

nowadays the list of files related to source code management (linting, formatting, etc), non python components not needing watching from python (nodejs, etc) has exploded multiple times over so instead of trying to keep track of that for now it's simpler to me to use watchfiles in whitelist mode (instead of a blacklist mode): i explicitly give it a list of python code folders to watch (including venv, because it's useful sometimes to quickly make changes to installed packages) and making the django dev webserver reload if any of those files change.

in this mode the only default useful filter i can think of is __pycache__, but those changes are related to actual source files are changed anyway. besides in dev mode i disable the python bytecode cache (python -B).

i think listing in the documentation the default filters is just the correct thing to do, as people like me will scratch their heads not understanding why changes are being ignored..

another place where it could make sense to show a default filter was used is the debug messages. i remember disabling debug after a while because it was very chatty, but i dont remember if it called out default filter items or not.

from watchfiles.