Nodemon.io VS chokidar

We will need some help with the development process, that is why we will use nodemon. Nodemon is a utility tool that automatically monitors changes in your Node.js application's source code and restarts the server whenever it detects any modifications. This tool helps streamline the development process by eliminating the need to manually stop and restart the Node.js server every time you make changes to the code, making it easier to see the effects of your changes immediately. We will use "npm install --save-dev nodemon" to install nodemon to the development section of our project. Also, we need to add a new setting to the scripts part of the package.json file that will start nodemon.

I’m sure you’ve used different tools to watch your source files and restart the application when you change your code. We’ve done this in various ways, one of which is using nodemon, a utility that monitors changes in your source files and automatically restarts the server.

I installed Nodemon to help here. For those who don't know already, Nodemon is a tool that helps by restarting the Node application everytime a change has been made to the code. This proved to be quite helpful as the trial & error was about to begin.

Nodemon is a dependency that monitors your project files for changes and automatically restarts the server once there is a change to any file being watched by nodemon. Think of nodemon as node monitor ;). Note: You shouldn't use nodemon on a production server, except you're part of the developers that attempt fix bug in production, lol.

nodemon

nodemon - automatically restarts our Node.js server whenever we make changes to the codebase

The nodemon is a popular library for running and restarting Node.js processes on file changes. All LTS Node.js support an option --watch-path, which allows to replace nodemon:

Or you can install nodemon for the same purpose. nodemon detects changes in the directory and restarts your application.

When I first encountered Node.js and also learned how to use Linux, nodemon was a library that I often used to develop applications, as it would automatically "reload" the new code upon saving without needing to manually "kill" and restart the application, a feature now commonly referred to as "hot reload."

A big win recently in the e18e space is that chokidar published a new 4.x version!

I used the Chokidar library to watch for changes in the project directory. Chokidar detects file changes and triggers deployment commands automatically.

We have a file explorer and a terminal, since files or directories could also be modified via terminal we need a way to communicate those changes to frontend. For this I made use of Chokidar, this package lets us setup file system watcher (nodemon also makes use of chokidar) and through following callbacks we can communicate file system changes.

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.