nodemon ignore directory

Question

In a Universal Javascript app, I would like nodemon to ignore client directory changes.

I have tried the following:

"devStart": "nodemon server/server.js --ignore 'client/*' --exec babel-node",
"devStart": "nodemon server/server.js --ignore 'client/' --exec babel-node",
"devStart": "nodemon server/server.js --ignore client/ --exec babel-node",
"devStart": "nodemon --ignore 'client/*' server/server.js --exec babel-node",
"devStart": "nodemon --ignore 'client/' server/server.js --exec babel-node",
"devStart": "nodemon --ignore client/ server/server.js --exec babel-node",

None of these work.

File structure:

+-server
+-client
+-package.json <------- where nodemon script is

However this is not working. Pretty sure it is a pattern issue.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You need to replace .. with ., or just reference client/ directly, also you will need to remove the asterisk:

"devStart": "nodemon --ignore ./client/ --exec babel-node src/server.js"

Or

"devStart": "nodemon --ignore client/ --exec babel-node src/server.js"

According to nodemon docs this is how to ignore a directory via command line:

nodemon --ignore lib/ --ignore tests/

Also note that nodemon will only restart the node process, if you change the npm script you will need to kill the process and re-run npm run devStart

Answer 2

In the very likely circumstance that you're using nodemon in a configuration file, you can create a separate configuration entry for those files to be ignored. Bonus, a cleaner looking nodemon call, especially if files to ignore grows large.

For example, this package.json instructs nodemon to ignore directory test:

{
  "scripts": {
    "test": "jest",
    "start": "nodemon server.js"
  },
  "nodemonConfig": {
      "ignore": ["test/*"]
  }
}

Find the complete instructions for nodemon configuration file settings here.

As in the other answer, be sure to restart nodemon for the configuration changes to take effect.