recode-fa23

nodemon

Starting and restarting your server each time you make a change can get cumbersome in development. Luckily for you someone else also got frustrated with that once and wrote an app called nodemon. Once installed as a global dependency (npm install -g nodemon), nodemon will listen in the root directory of your server for file changes and restart the server once it detects them.

Start your app now with nodemon app.js.

the output of the nodemon module when launching a node server

You’ll notice from the output what the default watch paths and extensions are. These can all be changed, by either providing various flags to nodemon as launch, like --watch and -e respectively, or by providing your own nodemon.json file. I have provided an example example nodemon.json file here file that will watch html, css, and javascript files.

When you make a change to any of the watched files and save it, you’ll see the server restart in the terminal output like so:

nodemon output after restarting the server after detecting changes in the watched files

This should get us almost all of the way to our Live Server app in VS Code, the only difference being a front-end live-reload javascript injection (we’d need webpack-dev-tools for something like this, but then we’re not working so much in the backend anymore, and blah blah blah…)