Nodemon.io VS chokidar

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.

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.

Using Chokidar to watch for the file changes - https://github.com/remy/nodemon/blob/main/lib/monitor/watch.js

ExpressJS is a fast, minimalist framework that provides several features for building web applications in Node.js, CORS is a Node.js package that allows communication between different domains, and Nodemon is a Node.js tool that automatically restarts the server after detecting file changes.

Nodemon is a package that will automatically restart our Node.js server after detecting any changes, making local development easy.

> 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.

The Parcel build command doesn’t support a watch mode like Jest does, but I’d recommend checking out the chokidar package for some help building your own live reload pipeline.

To start, we’re going to use chokidar to watch our file system for changes, so that we can reload when we update a view or a CSS file, not just JavaScript files.

Back when Orthodox File Managers were created, that was the whole list. Nowadays all operating systems have some sort of functionality of letting apps "watch" filesystem for changes, so it would just need to register that it's interested in some files or directories, and then it would receive a callback when that happens. Every operating system does it differently, and there are many gotchas and performance considerations, but a library like chokidar handles most of such issues already.

For watching files to new changes, we can make use of NodeJs inbuilt module, fs. It exposes a function called fs.watchFile but there have been a lot of issues reported by the community saying it’s not reliable. It fires multiple events sometimes for a single file change which results in high CPU utilization. So, to overcome this problem we can use the chokidar package.