Nodemon.io VS chokidar

nodemon - enables automatic reload of your server after code change docs

Then, install nodemon (in the VSCode terminal also), which, to my understanding, automatically refreshes the server you'll be sending requests to, whenever you make a change. Using plain node.js, you'd have to manually stop and restart the server after every change.

That's already pretty good, but as you already know it's a PITA to work with this during development. You will have to rebuild your Docker images whenever you change your code, even though your apps will probably support hot-reloading out of the box (or with something like Nodemon if not).

Are you moving your projects to use ES Modules but you are facing some unexpected issues? You are not alone in this fight. In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up nodemon along with ts-node.

We can now use npm run dev to start the server using nodemon, which enables hot refreshing on changes.

Welcome to my blog, where we dive into the intriguing world of Node.js development and tackle one of the common stumbling blocks many developers encounter: the "Nodemon Error - nodemon.ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system." If you've ever come across this error while working with Nodemon, fear not! In this article, we will explore the causes behind this issue, understand why scripts are disabled on certain systems and most importantly, provide you with practical solutions to overcome this obstacle and keep your development workflow seamless. So, let's embark on this troubleshooting journey together and empower ourselves to conquer the Nodemon Error!

You’ll need to restart the server using node index.js whenever you change any project file. You can also use Nodemon to automate this.

nodemon will be required to monitor for any changes in our source code and automatically restart our server.

For this, we'll use chokidar - more specifically the chokidar-cli package. chokidar is probably the most useful file watching library for the nodejs ecosystem and it will serve us well.

tailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number

is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.

[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...

The watching magic is really in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar library

> It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.

You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.

Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues

Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change.

So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be revisited later on.

Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.

The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.

OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.

Next, you can use a library like chokidar to listen for changes in your source directory. Create a ws server, and whenever a file changes, send a message.

As another has mentioned, nodemon uses chokidar under the hood for the actual file watching part.

At the end of the day, ironically, Nodemon does not even implement file watching functionality. It is a thin wrapper around chokidar (see source code), and the way it is being used is neither efficient (CPU and your battery usage) or performant. So it is not a false argument, just perhaps not the most appealing.

for file watching, it might use something similar to https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar

First, we need to install chokidar to enable watching and automatically refreshing our files.