Node.js - nodemon vs node - development vs production

Question

I would like to use $>npm start and have it use "nodemon" for development and "node" for production. I can't put conditional logic in my package.json file, so how is this best accomplished?

Answer 1

You should be able to use NPM's start as a regular shell script.

"scripts": {
  "start": "if [$NODE_ENV == 'production']; then node app.js; else nodemon app.js; fi"
}

Now to start your server for production

$ NODE_ENV='production' npm start

or for development

$ NODE_ENV='development' npm start

Answer 2

nodemon actually reads the package.start value, so if you just set the start property to what you'd have in production, like node app.js, then run nodemon without any arguments, it'll run with package.start and restart as you'd expect in development.