How to automatically reload Node.js project when using pm2

Question

I am currently programming Node.js with Express.js, and every time I change a line of code in the file router or app, I need to type the command:

pm2 reload id_project.

How do I make pm2 auto-reload the project when a file is changed?

Solution 1

By default, pm2 doesn’t automatically refresh our server every time we change files. You need to start your pm2 project with the --watch cli argument in order to tell pm2 to refresh when files have changed:

pm2 start id_project --watch

check out the docs for more details, or @rogier-spieker answer which is more detailed.

Solution 2

You need to start your pm2 project with the --watch option:

pm2 start <script|name|id> --watch

Where <script|name|id> refers to:

• script the path to the script you want to let pm2 handle
• name the name of the configuration in the "ecosystem" file
• id refers to an already running application using pm2, which can be obtained using pm2 list (note that this would actually require a restart instead of start, so it's probably the least desirable of the options)

You could also specify which files/directories to ignore:

pm2 start <script> --watch --ignore-watch "node_modules"

Watch & Restart

Or create an "ecosystem" json file describing how you want pm2 to treat your project:

{
  "name": "project_name",
  "script": "index.js",
  "watch": true,
  "ignore_watch": ["node_modules"]
}

JSON options

Solution 3

pm2 is a Node process manager that has lots of bells and whistles. you can run the below command to automatically restarting the node application when file changes in the directory are detected.

pm2 start index.js --watch

Note that because pm2 runs things in the background, you can’t just ctrl+c your way out of a running pm2 process. You have to stop it by passing the ID or the name.

pm2 stop 0
pm2 stop index

other two options are below

npx supervisor index.js
nodemon index.js