How to uninstall Watchman on a Mac

How do I uninstall Watchman on a Mac?

watchman shutdown-server
launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist
mv ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist ~/.Trash/
brew uninstall watchman

Do it in that order. Uninstall first and the agent keeps trying to start a program that is gone at every login.

What does Watchman leave behind?

Where	Size here	What it is
Homebrew `watchman`	14 MB	The program, version 2025.05.19
`~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.facebook.watchman.plist`	4 KB	Starts the server at login; was loaded on our Mac
`/opt/homebrew/var/run/watchman`	small	State and socket
`.watchmanconfig` in projects	a few bytes each	Per project settings; harmless

Watchman writes the LaunchAgent itself the first time it runs, which is why Homebrew does not remove it. launchctl list | grep watchman shows whether it is loaded.

Will React Native still work without Watchman?

Yes. Metro falls back to its own file watcher. Large projects may notice slower reloads. For React Native's caches, see React Native Metro cache.

Find what is left in one look

Free Mac shows Homebrew's folders on the Storage map, and its System tab shows whether a background process is still running. What you pick goes to the Trash. Other Homebrew leftovers are in what brew zap leaves.

Related: uninstall mongosh and uninstall fzf.

Measured on 17 October 2026 on a MacBook Air (M1, 8 GB) running macOS 27.0.1, read only: launchctl list filtered for watchman, ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents, du -sh on the Cellar folder, brew uses --installed watchman (nothing), and watchman --version. Nothing was removed.

Common questions

Does brew uninstall watchman stop Watchman?

No. Run watchman shutdown-server and unload com.github.facebook.watchman from ~/Library/LaunchAgents, or it tries to start at every login.

Is it safe to uninstall Watchman?

Yes. React Native and Jest fall back to their own file watching. Large projects may reload a little slower.

What is com.github.facebook.watchman?

Watchman's login agent. It starts the Watchman server when you log in, and Watchman creates it the first time it runs.