Nodemon

Nodemon is a utility depended on by over 3 million projects on npm that monitors for any changes in source files and automatically restarts the server, making it the de facto standard development tool for Node.js application iteration. Created by Remy Sharp in 2010, the tool wraps the Node.js execution process with a file system watcher that detects modifications to source files and triggers an automatic process restart, eliminating the manual cycle of stopping the server with Ctrl-C and running the start command again after each code change. The tool detects the default file extension to monitor based on the project configuration, typically watching JavaScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Python, and JSON files in the current working directory and subdirectories. Beyond Node.js, the tool can run any executable including Python, Ruby, Make, and shell scripts, making it useful for development workflows across multiple language ecosystems. Advanced configuration through nodemon.json or package.json supports ignoring specific files or directories via glob patterns, watching only designated directories, delaying restarts to batch rapid file saves, executing pre-restart and post-restart lifecycle hooks, passing environment variables, and inheriting stdin for interactive REPL applications. The verbose mode logs which file change triggered each restart for debugging watch behavior. Legacy watch mode uses the fs.watch and fs.watchFile APIs with polling fallback for network-mounted file systems on Windows and Docker volumes. The tool integrates with TypeScript through ts-node, with Docker through volume mounting, and with nodemon events through programmatic require statements. Funded through Open Collective community sponsorship. MIT licensed. Copyright 2010-2026 Remy Sharp.