# Improving your development environment

# Table of Contents

# Managing your processes with PM2

PM2 is a process manager. It manages your applications' states, so you can start, stop, restart, and delete processes. It offers features such as monitoring running processes and setting up a "start with operating system" (be that Windows, Linux, or Mac) so your processes start when you boot your system.
I use PM2 as well, and find it quite useful to manage my processes. It also comes with a dashboard. (https://app.pm2.io/open in new window)

# Installation

You can install PM2 with NPM or Yarn.

# NPM:
npm i -g pm2
# Yarn:
yarn global add pm2

# Starting your app/process

Once you have installed it, all you have to do to start your app is to run the following:

pm2 start <your-file-name>.js

To give your process a name, run:

pm2 start <your-file-name>.js --name smort

You can also use --watch, which automatically restart your process as soon as a file change is detected, which can be useful for development environments:

pm2 start <your-file-name>.js --watch

To show your process list, run:

pm2 ls

# Using nodemom to auto-restart your processes

Another helpful package is nodemon. It will monitor for any changes in your source and automatically restart your server.

Use nodemon instead of node to run your code, and now your process will automatically restart when your code changes.

# Installation

npm i -g nodemon
# OR
yarn global add nodemon

To install it as a dev dependency:

npm i -D nodemon
# OR
yarn add --dev nodemon

# Usage

To start a script, all you have to do is run:

nodemon <your-file-name>.js
# Or if you installed it as a project dependency:
npx nodemon <your-file-name>.js

# Using package.json scripts

An easy way to run scripts like a script to start your bot, a script to lint your bot's files, or whatever scripts you use is by storing them in your package.json file. After you store these scripts in your package.json file, you can type npm start to start your bot or npm run lint to lint your code for errors.

# Getting started

If you haven't touched your package.json file yet (excluding installing dependencies), your package.json file should look similar to the following:

{
	"name": "my-bot",
	"version": "1.0.0",
	"description": "A Discord bot!",
	"main": "index.js",
	"scripts": {
		"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
	},
	"keywords": [],
	"author": "",
	"license": "ISC"
}

# Adding a script

Go to the scripts section. Add the following:

"start": "node index.js"

Your scripts section should resemble the following:

"scripts": {
  "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
  "start": "node index.js"
},

Now whenever you run npm start, npm run start, or yarn start in your bot's directory, it will run node index.js.
You can always add more scripts, and run them with npm run <script-name> or yarn <script-name>.