Option to disable "smart" watcher

[cdimitroulas]

I often find that the "smart" watcher gets in my way and I'd rather just rerun all the tests anytime any file is changed.

For example, when writing integration tests Ava is often not able to determine that a file change actually affects a particular test and so then it decides not to run that test again. This results in me having to go to that terminal and hit "r + Enter" in order to manually tell Ava to rerun all the tests.

It would be great if there was a flag or option which would disable this "smart" behaviour of Ava's --watch mode. The result would be that any file change would trigger a full rerun of all the tests.

[novemberborn]

AVA is supposed to re-run all tests if it can't attribute a changed file to a single test. Is the problem here that it's only partially attributing the changes, or is there something else going on?

Could you run watch mode with DEBUG=ava:* npx ava --watch and share the output? That should show you the changes and the decision making process.

I assume this is with AVA 3? There are fixes in AVA 4 (pre-release) but I think those fix accidental re-runs of all tests, so that won't help here.

[cdimitroulas]

We are not using ESM, only CommonJS.

This is our ava.config.js file:

export default {
  extensions: ["ts", "tsx"],
  files: ["src/**/*.test.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}"],
  require: ["ts-node/register/transpile-only"],
};

[novemberborn]

@cdimitroulas I was going to turn this into a feature request, but then I noticed something. Did the watcher observe the change to users.ts? Why did index.ts change?

[cdimitroulas]

The users.ts comment in the original code was just an example, it doesn't represent a real file in our app.

The real file was the subscriptions/index.ts that you can see detected in the watcher output. The watcher only understands that this is a dependency of /<redacted>/src/app.test.ts but doesn't understand that it's also a dependency of /<redacted>/src/modules/__tests__/someOtherTest.test.ts where the app is also imported

[novemberborn]

Sorry for being slow with this, both in ability to respond as figuring out the underlying problem.

I've tried to reproduce this with AVA 4, using straight-forward source and test files and ts-node/register/transpile-only. It is all working as expected.

As you've pointed out the problem is in the dependency tracking. It's not an issue we've come across but then the dependency tracking is a creative hack of the CommonJS module system so it shouldn't be too surprising that there's a poorly understood failure mode.

I've opened #2905 to have an option to disable dependency tracking.

[cdimitroulas]

Thank you!