For someone who is coming from PHP background the process of killing node and starting it again after every code change, seems very tedious. Is there any flag when starting a script with node to automatically restart node when code change is saved?
A good option is Node-supervisor and Node.js Restart on File Change is good article on how to use it, typically:
npm install supervisor -g
and after migrating to the root of your application use the following
supervisor app.js
You my friend would want to look at something called nodemon (https://github.com/remy/nodemon)
Nodemon will watch the files in the directory that nodemon was started, and if they change, it will automatically restart your node application.
Example:
nodemon ./server.js localhost 8080
or simply
nodemon server
forever module has a concept of multiple node.js servers, and can start, restart, stop and list currently running servers. It can also watch for changing files and restart node as needed.
Use the -w flag to watch file for changes:
forever -w ./my-script.js
In addition, you can watch directory and ignore patterns:
forever --watch --watchDirectory ./path/to/dir --watchIgnore *.log ./start/file