I found a fix for failing Watchman crawls! Then I lost to an age old computing arch nemesis…

Last time, I was unable to emulate my React Native app in an Android emulator due to a failed Watchman crawl. Watchman is a tool which monitors my changes while I write code and updates the application as it runs on a device. For some reason I couldn’t get it to work, until now. You can find the video at the bottom of the page

When Watchman fails, the terminal window provides a link to the documentation which contains terminal commands for restarting it.

Without these commands, Watchman will continue to fail even when the computer is restarted. After I input these commands, I attempted to run Watchman one more time before I came across the exact same issue AGAIN.

But something seemed off. How was it that the error persisted when the Watchman process ended? I opened my Activity Monitor to gain more insight. Maybe the process never actually ended. That’s when I saw it.

My laptop was using 7 GB of RAM!

Between the emulator, Chrome, Java, and a few other processes, my CPU was going bonkers. I had to restart immediately.

When I logged back in and tried again, sure enough, my application opened with no problem.

I now know how to troubleshoot failed Watchman crawls like a professional! You can find the video below.

-CF