Smartmon

smartmon is a small cli tool to automatically restart your nodejs application when a change occurs in any of the files required by your main script (including symlinked node_modules!).

Features

• No configuration - drop in replacement for the node cli.
• Watch only dependencies - Only changes in your requires script will cause a restart to your node application.
• Symlinks supported - for use cases like symlinked node modules.
• Monorepos supported - specifically created for monorepos support.

Motivation

Current tools used for automatically restarting your node process, are based on watching directories and files defined by the developer. In certain scenarios, this means watching files that are not really apart of your application, meaning unnecessary restarts.

Also, in a monorepo, you probably want to restart your node server when there is a change in another package dependency. Using directory watching to watch the folder in the node_modules would also mean watching files that are not actually related to your running node process.

Usage

Install smartmon globally:

npm:

npm i -g @botique/smartmon

yarn:

yarn global add @botique/smartmon

run your script with smartmon:

smartmon main.js

Debugging and flags

smartmon currently comes with no configuration options. All flags are passed to the node process. You can use debugging flags and more as usual.

What's inside

smartmon's smarts are powered by two awesome libraries: depedency-tree and watchpack. dependency-tree is used to find all the files that are required by your main script (and their dependencies) and watchpack is used for the same abstraction it is used by webpack, keeping the amount of watchers minimal when watching lots of files, that could be located across directories.