How to automatically reload Node.js project when using pm2

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

PM2 comes with a handy development tool that allow you to start an application and restart it on file change:

# Start your application in development mode
# it print the logs and restart on file change too

# Two way of running your application :
pm2-dev start my-app.js

# or

pm2-dev my-app.js

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"]
}

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