TSC Watch, Nodemon and Concurrently

Video Lecture

Description

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

tsc -p src/server/ -w

We can host using,

node dist/server/server.js

However, note that the node executable doesn't restart when there are changes to the server code. So instead, we run it using nodemon.

npm install nodemon --save-dev

Now host the server using

npx nodemon ./dist/server/server.js

Note

You cannot run nodemon directly from the command line unless it is also installed 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 concurrently --save-dev

Add this scripts section into our package.json, after the license line.

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

And then we can start, just by typing the command,

npm run dev