I needed to run a Node project and, if it failed for some reason, run it again.

I thought of using nodemon, which restarts a Node process when a file changes.

I assumed it would do the same when the process crashed, but it’s not how it works.

So I found this solution.

If the process crashes, I use the command line to run the touch command on the main app file, so nodemon detects a change in the file and restarts the process:

nodemon -x 'node app.js || touch app.js'

Simple, and it works.

Of course in a real environment you’d use a robust solution like pm2 (see my tutorial how to use pm2 to serve a Node.js app) but this is something I need to run for a couple hours on my local machine and it works.

Update: an alternative is using Forever https://www.npmjs.com/package/forever

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Axios crashes the Node.js process when the request fails
2:	How to set up a cron job that runs a Node.js app
3:	How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express
4:	Interact with the Google Analytics API using Node.js
5:	How to bulk convert file names using Node.js
6:	How to deep copy JavaScript objects using structuredClone
7:	How to handle file uploads in Node.js
8:	How to send an email using nodemailer
9:	Logging all the requests coming through an Express app
10:	How to upload an image to S3 using Node.js
11:	How to read a CSV file with Node.js
12:	How to set the current working directory of a Node.js program
13:	How to upload files to S3 from Node.js
14:	How to write a CSV file with Node.js
15:	Where to host a Node.js app
16:	Parsing JSON with Node.js
17:	nodemailer, how to embed an image into an email
18:	The Pug Guide
19:	▶︎ Restarting a Node process without file changes
20:	How to use Sequelize to interact with PostgreSQL