jest --watch throws Error: EACCES: permission denied for directory owned by root

Question

Problem

When I run jest --watch, I get a permission denied error on a directory in my repository, even if I use watchPathIgnorePatterns for the directory:

Error: EACCES: permission denied, scandir '/path/to/repo/.pgdata'

• .pgdata/ is a directory used as a Docker volume for postgresql.
• The directory is owned by root.

Solutions tried

I tried using watchPathIgnorePatterns in my jest config:

watchPathIgnorePatterns: ['<rootDir>/\\.pgdata/'],

I tried a similar pattern for modulePathIgnorePatterns and testPathIgnorePatterns.

I also tried setting the owner of .pgdata to my user with chown, but that required a change in the Docker setup that I don't want to make right now.

Answer 1

Using the roots config property fixed the problem:

roots: ['<rootDir>/__tests__']

This tells jest to only search for files in the __tests__ directory.

Note: I only have tests in __tests__, and I don't have a src/ directory. If I did, it would probably have to be included as well, as shown in the example in the documentation.

---

Even when using watchPathIgnorePatterns, the jest watcher still tries to run through all directories in the repository. Since it encounters a directory it does not have access to read from, it throws the error (tested on jest 28.1.0)

This unrelated issue comment for jest hinted at the solution.