Nodemon.io VS PM2

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."

But what is a symbolic link exactly? It comes from programming and I often liken symbolic links to basic redirects but with greater stability. However, not every package needs a place in .bin. Packages like nodemon, webpack, gulp, eslint and create-vue are found in .bin because they need to be executed. On the other hand, packages like animate.css, swiper and express operate at the application layer, so you won't find them in .bin after installation. How does npm determine whether a package is executable or not? It's simple: by using the bin property in your package.json to specify the executable path. If your package is executable, you can set it accordingly. Let's take a look at prettier's package.json file

With the release of Node.js 22, this feature has been stabilized, so this warning no longer appears. While you could previously use a third-party tool like nodemon, this update removes the need for a dependency by adding it directly to Node.js core.

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

GitHub: PM2 Repository

You can run the command pm2 status to check if both servers are online and running, as shown below. To learn about all of the other PM2 commands, read the documentation on PM2 Process Management Quick Start:

For teams using NGINX+PM2, moving to NGINX + HashiStack is a more robust and flexible solution—a great fit for startups looking for scalability without the complexity of Kubernetes.

PM2 Documentation - https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2

What we wanted was something like a supercharged pm2, but multi-node with good support for both docker and binaries.

6. PM2

More pm2 commands here

Start by registering the app using the official guide.

Run the application using PM2 (ref: Process manager for Node.js)