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FAQ

This is being added to as common issues occur on the issues, and where appropriate the answers will be added here.

This is a working document, and if it makes sense, I'll take pull requests to help make it better.

nodemon doesn't work with my REPL

Create an nodemon.json file with the setting:

{
  "restartable": false
}

This will leave the STDIN to your application rather than listening for the rs command to restart.

My script arguments are being taken by nodemon

Use the -- switch to tell nodemon to ignore all arguments after this point. So to pass -L to your script instead of nodemon, use:

$ nodemon app.js -- -L -opt2 -opt3

nodemon will ignore all script arguments after -- and pass them to your script.

Help! My changes aren't being detected!

nodemon has three potential methods it uses to look for file changes. First, it polls using the find command to search for files modified within the last second. This method works on systems with a BSD based find.

Next it tries using node's fs.watch. fs.watch will not always work however, and nodemon will try and detect if this is the case by writing a file to the tmp directory and seeing if fs.watch is triggered when it's removed. If nodemon finds that fs.watch was not triggered, it will then fall back to the third method (called legacy watch), which works by statting each file in your working directory looking for changes to the last modified time. This is the most cpu intensive method, but it may be the only option on some systems.

In certain cases, like when where you are working on a different drive than your tmp directory is on, fs.watch may give you a false positive. You can force nodemon to start using the most compatible legacy method by passing the -L switch, e.g. nodemon -L /my/odd/file.js.

nodemon tries to run two scripts

If you see nodemon trying to run two scripts, like:

9 Dec 23:52:58 - [nodemon] starting `node ./app.js fixtures/sigint.js`

This is because the main script argument (fixtures/sigint.js in this case) wasn't found, and a package.json's main file was found. ie. to solve, double check the path to your script is correct.

What has precedence, ignore or watch?

Everything under the ignore rule has the final word. So if you ignore the node_modules directory, but watch node_modules/*.js, then all changed files will be ignored, because any changed .js file in the node_modules are ignored.

nodemon doesn't work with fedora

Fedora is looking for nodejs rather than node which is the binary that nodemon kicks off.

The solution is a simple workaround, Linux 101:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/node

Fedora and Ubuntu pakage node as nodejs, because node.dpkg is

Description-en: Amateur Packet Radio Node program The node program accepts TCP/IP and packet radio network connections and presents users with an interface that allows them to make gateway connections to remote hosts using a variety of amateur radio protocols. They make the binary is nodejs, rather than node. So long as you're not using that Packet Radio Node Program mentioned above the workaround will work.

Thank you @EvanCarroll

Using nodemon with forever

If you're using nodemon with forever (perhaps in a production environment), you can combine the two together. This way if the script crashes, forever restarts the script, and if there are file changes, nodemon restarts your script. For more detail, see issue 30.

To achieve this you need to add the following on the call to forever:

  • Use forever's -c nodemon option to tell forever to run nodemon instead of node.
  • Include the nodemon --exitcrash flag to ensure nodemon exits if the script crashes (or exits unexpectedly).
  • Tell forever to use SIGTERM instead of SIGKILL when requesting nodemon to stop. This ensures that nodemon can stop the watched node process cleanly.
  • Optionally add the --uid parameter, adding a unique name for your process. In the example, the uid is set to foo.
forever start --uid foo --killSignal=SIGTERM -c nodemon --exitcrash server.js

To test this, you can kill the server.js process and forever will restart it. If you touch server.js nodemon will restart it.

To stop the process monitored by forever and nodemon, simply call the following, using the uid we assigned above (foo):

forever stop foo

This will stop both nodemon and the node process it was monitoring.

Note that I would not recommend using nodemon in a production environment - but that's because I wouldn't want it restart without my explicit instruction.

What does "verbose" give me?

The --verbose (or -V) puts nodemon in verbose mode which adds some detail to starting and restarting.

Additional restart information:

  • Which nodemon configs are loaded (local and global if found)
  • Which ignore rules are being applied
  • Which file extensions are being watch
  • The process ID of your application (the child pid)

For example:

14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] v1.0.17
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] reading config /Users/remy/Sites/jsbin-private/nodemon.json
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] ignoring: /Users/remy/Sites/jsbin-private/.git/**/* node_modules/**/node_modules
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] watching: /Users/remy/Sites/jsbin/views/**/* /Users/remy/Sites/jsbin/lib/**/* ../json/*.json config.dev.json
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] watching extensions: json,js,html
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] starting `node run.js`
14 Apr 15:24:58 - [nodemon] child pid: 9292

When nodemon detects a change, the following addition information is shown:

  • Which file(s) triggered the check
  • Which (if any) rules the file matched to cause a subsequent restart
  • How many rules were matched and out of those rules, how many cause a restart
  • A list of all the files that successfully caused a restart

For example, on lib/app.js being changed:

14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] files triggering change check: ../jsbin/lib/app.js
14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] matched rule: **/Users/remy/Sites/jsbin/lib/**/*
14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] changes after filters (before/after): 1/1
14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] restarting due to changes...
14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] ../jsbin/lib/app.js

14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] starting `node run.js`
14 Apr 15:25:56 - [nodemon] child pid: 9556

My .nodemonignore is being ignored

The new nodemon.json superceeds the .nodemonignore file, so if you have both, the .nodemonignore is not used at all.

Note that if you have a nodemon.json in your $HOME path, then this will also superceed the old ignore file.

nodemon does nothing

On Ubuntu globally installed node applications have been found to have no output when they're run. This seems to be an issue with node not being correctly installed (possibly linked to the binary having to be called nodejs).

The solution (that's worked in the past) is to install nvm first and using it to install node, rather than using apt-get (or similar tools) to install node directly.