Have you been developing a NextJS app with dynamic routing (using maybe Express), and found that every time you make a change you have to do the tedious process of shutting down the server (CTRL+C) and restarting it? (npm run dev).

If you're used to working with NodeJS, or ExpressJS, you've probably come across nodemon. It's a utility that enables hot reloading on Node-based servers, so that whenever you make a change to a server file and save -- it instantly starts to restart without any prompt from your part.

But nodemon doesn't work out of the box with NextJS and requires a small amount of configuration. If you try running nodemon without a config or the proper CLI params, you'll find that your server will start acting real wonky. My server started restarting infinitely, because it was detecting changes each time NextJS compiled, triggering an infinite loop of compilations.

This guide assumes you have a NextJS project with dynamic routing setup. You can find a few in the examples section of the NextJS repo

The solution?

Nodemon accepts a configuration file, which allows you have a greater degree of control over the process. By adding a few values to this file, we can solve all our issues.

Install nodemon

If you haven't already, install nodemon:

npm install --save-dev nodemon

Create the config file

Create a nodemon.json file in the project root and paste the following into it:

{
  "verbose": true,
  "ignore": ["node_modules", ".next"],
  "watch": ["server/**/*", "server.js"],
  "ext": "js json"
}

This tells nodemon to ignore the .next folder, which is used as a cache for the Next compiler (and triggers the infinite reload). And we also tell it which file to watch for changes from. I keep my server file in a separate server folder, since I have stuff like routes/middleware/etc that need separate files and folders.

Update your npm dev script

Now you can modify your package.json and update the 'dev' script value to use nodemon instead of the default node server.js:

"scripts": {
    "dev": "nodemon -w server/server.js server/server.js",
    "build": "next build",
    "start": "NODE_ENV=production node server.js"
  },

Now you can run npm run dev and you'll have yourself a hot-reloading server.

I found this solution on the NextJS Github issues, where a people were having - go figure - the same issue.

Hope that helps ✌️ Ryo


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