Constant feedback driven development with Nodemon

This post was originally published at TK's Blog.

I'm learning a lot about building new projects using Typescript. Today I want to tell you more about building things with constant feedback and how to make the development dynamic.

At first, when I started building things with Typescript, for every function I built, I had two options:

1. Execute the file by using ts-node.
2. Open a repl with ts-node and copy and paste the function there.

At first, it is ok to test simple things. But you all need to stop the development and lose the flow. I wanted a more dynamic development flow and I found nodemon.

nodemon is not specific for Typescript. It is a

Tool that helps develop node.js based applications by automatically restarting the node application when file changes in the directory are detected. - nodemon.io

So, for every file you saved, nodemon will restart the application. With that, you can have constant feedback from what you are building.

Setting up

If you really like this tooling, you can install it globally:

npm install -g nodemon

But I like to configure dependencies for each project. So I install it in the dev dependencies in the project I want to use it.

npm install --save-dev nodemon

After installing it, we have to configure the nodemon json config. This is the simple configuration I did for my publisher tool:

{
  "watch": [
    "src",
    "examples"
  ],
  "ext": ".ts,.js,.html,.json",
  "ignore": [],
  "exec": "ts-node ./src/index.ts"
}

It watches the src and example folders with .ts, .js, .html, and .json files. If one of these files changes, the nodemon executes your main file defined in the exec property. In my project, I add the main file in the ./src/index.ts.

In your package.json, you can add a script to handle nodemon:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start:dev": "nodemon"
  }
}

Run the command:

npm run start:dev

And now your app is up and running.. with constant feedback.

As I said earlier, dynamic feedback is really important in development mode. It helps you have instant feedback as early as possible, making it breaking and working faster.

For your next project, I really recommend you to play around with this library. Or set up a different tool to make your development more dynamic.

Resources

• npm package