daily-email: add 2023-04-15

src/content/daily-email/2023-04-15.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+title: >
+  Automatically running commands with nodemon
+pubDate: 2023-04-15
+permalink: >
+  archive/2023/04/15/automatically-running-commands-with-nodemon
+tags: []
+---
+
+Instead of running the same commands over and over again, some of the command-line tools that I use have a `watch` mode and will automatically re-run when files are changed, however, not all do.
+
+Instead of doing this manually, I can achieve the same thing though using a tool called `nodemon` - a script monitor for node projects, but it can work with non-node projects too.
+
+Here's an example where I'm automatically re-running my PHPUnit tests using a `just test` recipe each time a file within my custom modules directory changes:
+
+```plain
+nodemon \
+  --watch web/modules/custom \
+  --ext '*' \
+  --exec "just test --stop-on-failure --colors=always"
+```
+
+I specify the files or directories I want to watch, which file extensions should trigger a restart (in this case, I've enabled all extensions), and the command to execute.
+
+This watches all files and run all of the tests, but I can filter either if I need to.
+
+As well as PHP tools like PHPUnit and PHPStan, I also use this for other things such as when creating presentation slides with rst2pdf where I can automatically re-generate the PDF whenever I update the rst file.