smart-restart

nodemon and piping are great, but each has their limitations:

nodemon sometimes restarts when you change files the server isn't using, which is a hassle when you're working on isomorphic apps and just want a webpack hot update on the client.

piping is difficult to use with node-inspector because it runs a cluster; the supervisor process gets debug port 5858, and your app process gets something else. It's even more of a pain to use with --debug-brk because the supervisor process starts with a breakpoint as well, so you have to open node-inspector for it, resume it, then open node-inspector for your actual app.

smart-restart combines both approaches: it uses piping's require hook to only watch files that have been required, but it spawns your app instead of running a cluster, so that you can pass --debug or --debug-brk to your app.

Usage

To run ./src/index.js in a child process and watch files it requires:

var launch = require('smart-restart')

launch({
  main: './src/index.js',      // path to your script
  command: 'node',             // optional, the command to `spawn` (default: `process.argv[0]`)
  commandOptions: ['--debug'], // optional, arguments that come before `main`
  args: [...],                 // optional, arguments that come after `main`
  spawnOptions: {...},         // optional, options for `spawn`
  ignore: /(\/\.|~$)/,         // optional, ignore pattern for `chokidar` (default: /(\/\.|~$)/)
  usePolling: false,           // optional, whether to use polling in `chokidar` (default: false)
  interval: 100,               // optional, polling interval for `chokidar` (default: 100)
  binaryInterval: 300,         // optional, binary polling interval for `chokidar` (default: 300)
  includeModules: false,       // optional, whether to include `node_modules` (default: false)
})

You can launch as many other processes as you want in the same supervisor process.