Node-dev is a supervisor for Node.js that spawns a node child-process and restarts it when changes are detected in the filesystem. If the child-process exits due to an error, the supervisor waits for another modification before it attempts to re-spawn it. The output written to stderr is captured and scanned for stack-traces. If an error is detected it is displayed as Growl notification.
The node-dev supervisor can be installed via npm:
npm install node-dev
This will add the node-dev executable to your PATH.
In order to use Growl notifications growlnotify (form the Extras folder on the Growl disk image) must be installed on your system.
Instead of running node script.js, type node-dev script.js instead.
All command-line arguments are passed on to the child-process: node-dev —debug app.js foo will start the child-process with --debug and pass foo as first argument. Hence your app will be debugged and not the supervisor itself.