TSC Watch, Nodemon and Concurrently

Video Lecture

Description

After creating the tsconfig.json, we can now compile and watch for changes using

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 files, 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.