mosampaio / node-dev

Zero-conf Node.js reloading

About

Node-dev is a development tool for Node.js that automatically restarts the node process when a script is modified.

With node-dev you don't have to manually specify which files should be watched nor do you have to deal with ignore lists for files that should be excluded. This is done using a thin wrapper script that hooks into the require() function as well as into several methods of the VM module to determine which files need to be monitored.

This does not only work for .js files, but also for .json or .node or .coffee files or any other custom extension that has been added to require.extensions.

Another great benefit of this zero-config approach is that it doesn't cause any unnecessary restarts when for example client-side only scripts are modified.

Desktop Notifications

Status and error messages are displayed as desktop notification using either Growl or libnotify.

Usage

Simply use the node-dev binary as you would normally use node.

Note: All arguments are passed on to the child-process. node-dev --debug app.js will debug your application, not the supervisor itself.

You may also use node-dev with CoffeeScript apps. Just run node-dev app.coffee -- that's all.

Installation

Node-dev can be installed via npm:

npm install -g node-dev

This will install node-dev and make it globally available (note the -g option).

In order to use Growl notifications growlnotify must be installed on your system.

Settings

You can set the NODE_DEV_CLEARSCREEN environment variable to true if in order to automatically clear the terminal screen upon restarts.

Contributors

• Ricardo Tomasi (CoffeeScript support)
• Sergey Ovechkin (libnotify support)