The first step to building my fullstack bookmark application is learning about backend development. While testing out basic concepts in Node.js and Express, I found myself constantly terminating jobs only to restart them a few moments later after making minor changes to my code. Going through this process every time I wanted to see anything updated became pretty annoying fairly quickly.
I decided to install nodemon to automate the process of reloading my server after changes had been made.
I decided to install it as a dependency first and run it as an npm script.
npm install --save-dev nodemon
Instead of using npm start, I used npx with the npx package runner instead.
After a successful local installation, I decided to install nodemon globally.
npm install -g nodemon
This way, in addition to being able to use nodemon for any file, I could also save myself the time of writing npm start or npx prior to nodemon.