Watchman crawl failed. Retrying once with node crawler

Question

Watchman crawl failed. Retrying once with node crawler. Usually this happens when watchman isn't running. Create an empty .watchmanconfig file in your project's root folder or initialize a git or hg repository in your project.

Error: watchman --no-pretty get-sockname returned with exit code=1, signal=null, stderr= 2018-03-23T11:33:13,360: [0x7fff9755f3c0] the owner of /usr/local/var/run/watchman/root-state is uid 501 and doesn't match your euid 0

Answer 1

You're running watchman as root but the state dir, which may contain trigger definitions and thus allow spawning arbitrary commands, is not owned by root. This is a security issue and thus watchman is refusing to start.

The safest way to resolve this is to remove the state dir by running:

rm -rf /usr/local/var/run/watchman/root-state

I'd recommend that you avoid running tools that wish to use watchman using sudo to avoid this happening again.