petruisfan/node-supervisor

node-supervisor is a small command-line tool for Node.js that watches your code files and automatically restarts your program when they change. It serves a similar purpose to tools like nodemon: instead of manually stopping and starting your server every time you edit a file, you run your program through supervisor and it handles restarts for you. When a watched file changes, supervisor stops the running process and starts it again from scratch. Because it does a full restart, you avoid problems that can come from trying to reload modules in place, such as memory leaks or stale references between files. The tool is installed globally via npm and then used in place of node at the command line. You can tell it which folders or files to watch, which extensions to include, and which folders to ignore. By default it watches the current directory for changes to .js and .node files. Supervisor also handles crashes: if your program exits unexpectedly, supervisor restarts it automatically. You can control this behavior with flags to tell it not to restart on certain exit conditions, such as only when the program exits with an error code, or not at all. Other options include setting a polling interval, saving the supervisor process ID to a file, starting the process with Node debug or inspect flags, using instant kill instead of graceful shutdown, and logging which file triggered a restart. You can also type rs in the terminal while supervisor is running to trigger a manual restart without changing any files. Installation is a single npm install command. No configuration file is required.