Automatic Reloading Using Nodemon#

📝 This lesson's quiz can be found - here.
🗒️ Solutions for this lesson's quiz can be found - here.

When developing our server application, there are going to be a lot of changes we're going to make to our code. We probably don't want to stop our running server and restart it every single time we make an update. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a third-party tool that did that for us? Well, there is, and it's called Nodemon!

Nodemon is a tool that will monitor for any changes in our source code and automatically restart our Node server when a change is detected. To install Nodemon, we'll run the npm install command but this time use the -D flag which is a shorthand version of --save-dev. This indicates that the package to be installed is a development dependency. Development dependencies are packages that are only needed for local development.

server $: npm install -D nodemon

After nodemon is installed, our package.json file will list nodemon in the devDependencies list:

{

  "name": "tinyhouse-v1-server",

  "version": "0.1.0",

  "dependencies": {

    "express": "^4.17.1"

  },

  "devDependencies": {

    "nodemon": "^1.19.1"

  }

}