For use during development of a node.js based application.
nodemon will watch all the files in the directory that nodemon was started, and if they change, it will automatically restart your node application.
nodemon does not require any changes to your code or method of development. nodemon simply wraps your node application and keeps an eye on any files that have changed.
Either through forking or:
npm install nodemon
And nodemon will be installed in to your bin path.
nodemon wraps your application, so you can pass all the arguments you would normally pass to your app:
nodemon [your node app]
For example, if my application accepted a host and port as the arguments, I would start it as so:
nodemon ./server.js localhost 8080
Any output from this script is prefixed with [nodemon], otherwise all output from your application, errors included, will be echoed out as expected.
In some cases you will want to ignore some specific files, directories or file patterns, to prevent nodemon from prematurely restarting your application.
The nodemon-ignore file is automatically created in the directory that you run your application from, so that you can have application specific ignore lists.
You can use the example ignore file as a basis for your nodemon, but it's very simple to create your own:
# this is my ignore file with a nice comment at the top
/vendor/* # ignore all external submodules
/public/* # static files
./README.md # a specific file
*.css # ignore any CSS files too
The ignore file accepts:
- Comments starting with a
#symbol - Blank lines
- Specific files
- File patterns (this is converted to a regex, so you have full control of the pattern)
nodemon currently depends on the unix find command (which also is installed on Macs)