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TSC Watch, Nodemon and Concurrently

Video Lecture

TSC Watch, Nodemon and Concurrently TSC Watch, Nodemon and Concurrently

Description

We continue to setup our project, so that any changes we make to the source code are automatically recompiled and servable from the NodeJS server.

When compiling using TSC, when can also set the watch flag so that any changes to the source code are automatically recompiled.

tsc -p src/server/ -w

We can host using

node dist/server/server.js

The nodejs doesn't restart when there are changes to the compiled output, so we can install nodemon

npm install --save-dev nodemon

Now host the server using

npx nodemon dist/server/server.js

Note

Note the use of the npx before the nodemon command above. Since nodemon was installed with the --save-dev option, you cannot call it directly from the command line unless it is also installed globally. Leave off the --save-dev option if you want to install it globally. Prefixing the nodemon command with npx, as I do above, allows you to bypass the need to install it globally.

Rather than typing these compile and nodemon commands all the time, we can create a single command to start both processes at the same time.

Install concurrently

npm install --save-dev concurrently

Add this line to the package.json scripts section

"dev" : "concurrently -k \"tsc -p ./src/server -w\" \"nodemon ./dist/server/server.js\"",

And start using

npm run dev

Note

Since we are running the nodemon and concurrently libs from the new dev script in the projects package.json, it is unnecessary to also have nodemon and concurrently installed globally if you don't really want to.