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Automatically refresh the browser on Node / Express server changes 🚀

Cássio Lacerda on June 08, 2021

One of the first things that most developers learn when starting with ExpressJS is using Express Generator to create a basic app structure. After i...

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Ali Ali • Jun 28 '21

I did the same but its not reloading my files. I am using ejs.
//Newbie

Ema Suriano • Oct 6 '21

Most probably is because by default nodemon watch for .js, .mjs, .coffee, .litcoffee, .json extensions. Therefore you can send the flag of -e ejs to the command of watch to make it watch your files :)

Fred Anthony • Sep 14 '21

"From now on, run the server with npm run watch instead of npm start."

sadko • Jan 13 '22

Config package.json thus. "dev": "nodemon --ext * ' js,html,ejs,css,scss" app.js"

Great...

Ryan Davis • Jan 13 '23

@cassiolacerda thanks for the guide! It worked great for me. Is there a way to make livereload run only in my development environment? Right now if I try to deploy to production with liveserver changes in my app.js, it breaks everything.

Stephen Belovarich • Mar 17 '23 • Edited

You need to have a concept of environments. Typically process.env.NODE_ENV is used. After you have a environment declared, conditionally set the middleware.

const env = process.env.NODE_ENV || "development";

if (env === "development") {
  app.use(connectLiveReload());
}

iway1 • Nov 27 '22 • Edited

Eliminating repetitive actions during development helps to optimize our performance as developers.

Great quote! Even if something only takes a few seconds, automating it can save us hours and hours in the long run. As I've improved as a software developer, the more and more I prioritize these types of things

Xfaramir • Jan 24 '25

Thanks it worked ! You can also add a nodemon.json afterwards to specify the files you want to watch for changes.

{ "watch": ["views", "routes", "public", "bin"], "ext": "ejs,js,json" }

denelvis • Nov 29 '21 • Edited

Hello. Can you help?
Why when I did some changes page on localhost:port/users or any other endpoint nodemon don't reload this page?

Working only on root.

Cássio Lacerda • Dec 21 '21 • Edited

Hello, guy!

Livereload works only with rendered HTML pages. It needs to inject a script tag that points to the server created by Livereload on port 35729 (see in the last section).

The endpoint /users encountered in the repo send data to client-side with res.send method, where data type generated by that is application/json. In home endpoint /, the application uses res.render to outputs text/html data, so it works here, and not in /users.