Question

Just installed nodeJS and NPM and nodesupervisor via Terminal in OS 10.5.8.

I have a server running with:

var http = require("http");

function onRequest(request, response) {
  console.log("Request received.");
  response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
  response.write("Hello World!");
  response.end();
}

http.createServer(onRequest).listen(8888);

console.log("Server has started.");

How do I restart the server, without quitting Terminal if the following is updated:

response.write("Hello World, From NodeJS!");

I’ve seen this “^C” used in Terminal, in a NodeJS video TUT.

Also have node supervisor which appears to handle these changes, but when I attempt to use the watch “-w” command(supervisor -w server.js),
on server.js, nothing (“file being watched” or something) is returned, and the supervisor help screen simply reloads.

NPM: 1.0.96
nodeJS: v0.4.11

Answer 1

Ctrl-C is definitely the way to quit node without quitting terminal all together, just like most command-line apps.

A better option for you might be nodemon. It is specifically for restarting node when changes to files are made.

To install:

npm install nodemon -g

Then simply execute your app with nodemon instead of node.

nodemon server.js