Configuring Nodemon on a Node.js server

The constant rebooting of a Node.js application manually is a very tedious and tiring job, but to avoid having to do this work over and over again, Nodemon is responsible for automatically restarting the Node.js application server in development mode.

Francisco Suarez
Frontend Weekly
2 min readFeb 2, 2019

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In the following steps, I will show you how to install and configure Nodemon in your project and how to run a Node.js. server.

Step 1

Organize the src source directory and start the server in a server.js file, the file can carry any convention that is used to start a Node.js server ( index.js or app.js)

Update the package.json by adding a start script

Step 2

Add Express this will allow us to start a minimum server to perform this test

Start a new terminal in which we will start the server executing the script npm startafter executing it, it will return a message like the following node src/index.js

Open a new terminal and execute the following code curl -X GET http://localhost:3000/ that will allow us to verify that the API works correctly.

If we return the message La API funciona correctamente! it means that we are doing well!

Now, if we change the response message in the server.js file, you will have to restart the server manually to get the desired result:

Use CTRL + C to stop the server that is currently running and restart it using the same command before: npm run start.

Using the curl command again from the terminal window we obtain the desired result:

Step 3
Add Nodemon as devDependency :

We will review the package.json

Stage 4

Add the dev command to the package.json file

Now run npm run dev and request again the use of the curl command, and we will see that the message is the same as we had before:

If I change the message in the file server.js again, and this time I will not have to restart the server, since Nodemon is observing the changes using the src directory, through its parameter — watch .

You will see that it is updated only without having to restart the server, to cut it press CTRL + C

Thanks for reading 💻

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Francisco Suarez
Frontend Weekly

📚Computer Science Student 🚀 JavaScript Developer 🐱‍🚀 @reactjs @nodejs 🐱‍🏍 GDSC Lead🛸 and Contributor at MDN 🔥