I’m trying to setup my own nodejs server, but I’m having a problem. I can’t figure out how to see changes to my application without restarting it. Is there a way to edit the application and see changes live with node.js?
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I’m trying to setup my own nodejs server, but I’m having a problem. I can’t figure out how to see changes to my application without restarting it. Is there a way to edit the application and see changes live with node.js?
Check out Node-Supervisor. You can give it a collection of files to watch for changes, and it restarts your server if any of them change. It also restarts it if it crashes for some other reason.
“Hot-swapping” code is not enabled in NodeJS because it is so easy to accidentally end up with memory leaks or multiple copies of objects that aren’t being garbage collected. Node is about making your programs accidentally fast, not accidentally leaky.
EDIT, 7 years after the fact: Disclaimer, I wrote node-supervisor, but had handed the project off to another maintainer before writing this answer.