Developing a node.js based service?
Fed up with manually restarting your app every time you make a change?

If you’ve answered yes to both questions give nodemon a try.

nodemon will monitor the files in the directory, and in case of a change - it will automatically restart your node application.

Installation

$ npm install -g nodemon

Usage

Since nodemon is a replacement wrapper for node that watches for changes, just replace node with nodemon when you run your script:

$ nodemon my_service.js

In case you need a manual restart of your app type rs followed by a return, instead of stopping and restarting nodemon.

I recommend adding a dev script under npm scripts in package.json file:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node my_app.js",
    "dev": "nodemon my_app.js"
  }
}

There are other features I found useful:

• Using config files or nodemonConfig in the package.json file
• Specifying extension watch list: nodemon -e js,json
• Monitoring multiple directories: --watch flag per directory watched

Note: I plan to cover debugging with nodemon in a separate post.