Nodemon.io VS PM2

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.

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

There are plenty of ways to accomplish this: Docker, Kubernetes, Pulumis, etc., but I don’t like to add too much complexity. So for a basic app, I like to use PM2, a Node.js process manager with great features, including the ability to run our app in the background.

This project will consist of a single "index.js" file that you can deploy anywhere. I recommend using an Nginx reverse proxy and pm2 to keep the service running.

Your app should be running now. To be able to run the app in the background, I will use pm2. Stop your application using "Ctrl + C" and install pm2

Additionally, it provides many more features to manage and visualize the processes. More details on PM2 can be found in their official documentation.

You can create child processes that run concurrently with the application sharing the same port, which helps scale the application within the same server. Clusters can be implemented using the built-in cluster module of Node.js or a library like PM2, widely used in production applications.

Lastly if you want to run your dev build tool and backend as a single command you could try something like pm2 (https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2) or concurrently (https://www.npmjs.com/package/concurrently). This isn't necessary but might be a nice-to-have. NPM workspaces could help you organize this with a common package.json file too. (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/using-npm/workspaces)

For more documentation on pm2, you can read from here

"PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks." (pm2)