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Developing the MERN Starter in VS Code

MERN is a scaffolding tool which makes it easy to build apps using Mongo, Express, React and NodeJS. The MERN Starter is a boilerplate project for building a universal React app.

This recipe shows how to run and debug the MERN Starter in VS Code.

Create Starter project and open it in VS Code

  • Make sure your MongoDB is running. For MongoDB installation guide see this.

  • Make sure that you have nodemon installed globally. Otherwise install it:

    npm install nodemon -g

  • Visit MERN v2.0 and install the MERN Starter v2.0:

    git clone https://github.com/Hashnode/mern-starter.git
cd mern-starter
npm install

  • Open the starter project in VS Code:

    code .

  • We recommend to install these VS Code extensions: Babelrc, Docker, ESLint.

Launch and Debug the Starter

In VS Code open the Debug viewlet and press the gear icon. A QuickPick UI appears and shows the available debugging environments. Select Node.js.

VS Code automatically detects a MERN based project and creates this launch configuration:

{
    "type": "node",
    "request": "launch",
    "name": "Launch Program",
    "protocol": "inspector",
    "runtimeExecutable": "nodemon",
    "runtimeArgs": [
        "--inspect=9222"
    ],
    "program": "${workspaceFolder}/index.js",
    "port": 9222,
    "restart": true,
    "env": {
        "BABEL_DISABLE_CACHE": "1",
        "NODE_ENV": "development"
    },
    "console": "integratedTerminal",
    "internalConsoleOptions": "neverOpen"
}

This configuration closely follows the npm start script from the package.json and enables debugging support.

Instead of the node runtime executable, nodemon is used which watches file modifications and restarts the node program automatically. The restart attribute configures the VS Code node debugger to re-attach automatically whenever node terminates.

With this setup it is possible to edit the source while the server is running: source edits automatically trigger a rebuild and restart the server. Because these restarts are quite expensive, we recommend that you change VS Code's files.autoSave setting from after delay to one of the other values. With this saves no longer occur automatically.

The launch config uses the integrated terminal because nodemon is an interactive tool that reads from stdin which is not supported in the default debug console.

Please note: there is an unfortunate redundancy (and potential inconsistency) between the protocol, runtimeArgs, and port attributes. If the value of protocol is changed to legacy, the values for runtimeArgs and port must be changed as well, otherwise a problematic inconsistency will occur. This redundancy can be eliminated after we have implemented this feature for the 'legacy' and the 'inspector' protocol.

Please note: Currently this recipe requires that "nodemon" is installed globally (despite the fact that it would be available in node_modules/.bin). This requirement will be lifted after we have implemented this feature.