How can I tell nodemon to ignore all node_modules except for one directory

Question

I have a Node.js server I am developing and I'm using nodemon to have the server restarted when the source code changes.

This server has a dependency on another module, which I am also developing, so it would be nice if changes to that module also restarted the server.

Best attempt yet (Thanks, bitstrider!)

I made a repo to reproduce this problem with minimal code if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/shawninder/nodemon-troubles

The highlights are in nodemon.json:

{
  "ignoreRoot": [
    ".git",
    ".nyc_output",
    ".sass-cache",
    "bower-components",
    "coverage"
  ],
  "ignore": [
    "node_modules/!(is-node)",
    "node_modules/is-node/node_modules"
  ]
}

• ignoreRoot is the same as the defaults, but without node_modules.
• ignore is where I'm trying to tell it to ignore node_modules, but not is-node.

This almost works (editing is-node restarts the server) but it's watching all the node modules, not only is-node.

How can I tell nodemon to ignore all node modules except for one?

Details

• I'm using the latest version of nodemon, 1.11.0
• I also tried with https://github.com/remy/nodemon/pull/922

Explaining the problem

Nodemon takes the ignores and combines them into one big regular expression before passing this along to chokidar. It's a custom parsing algorithm based on regular expressions and supports neither glob negation nor regular expression syntax. For example, the example above produces the following regular expression:

/\.git|\.nyc_output|\.sass\-cache|bower\-components|coverage|node_modules\/!\(is\-node\)\/.*.*\/.*|node_modules\/is\-node\/node_modules\/.*.*\/.*/

Notice the negation character ! end up as a literal ! in the resulting regular expression. Using negative look-ahead syntax also doesn't work because the control characters are transformed into literal characters.

Answer 1

Since nodemon uses minimatch for matching, you should be able to use negation with the symbol !, according to the documentation.

So in your case, try:

{
  "ignore" : "node_modules/!(my-watched-module)/**/*"
}

This should ignore all module files except those within my-watched-module

NOTE: The ignore rule here only targets files, not directories. This behavior makes sense in the context of nodemon because its watching for file changes.