Hexo Server Auto Restart

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Introduce Hexo Auto Restart

Hexo is a great blog platform, the article you are looking right now is written on top of Hexo. If you tired manually to Ctrl + c start and restart server, you probably want two console window, one runs hexo server -s, -s means only serve static html files, which located at public/ folder, and the other one runs hexo generate --watch, it’s builtin command to watch file updates and auto generate new static files. Start those two commands, refresh your browser and you should see the new updates.

Problem With Watch in VagrantBox

I personally had pretty much all developing projects running in the vagrant box, the problem of hexo generate --watch seems like doesn’t corporate with vagrant box, so the Nodemon comes into the game.

Install Nodemon

I prefer install Nodemon globally, [sudo] npm install -g nodemon, but if you don’t like it, just do npm install nodemon

Magic Command

Command: nodemon -e html,md,less --ignore public/ -L --exec 'hexo generate', The Nodemon will start watching file updates and automatically runs hexo generate

Short explanation:

  • -e is adding the specific extension to Nodemon watch list, nodemon default looks for files with .js, .coffee, .litcoffee and .json, on this example, Nodemon will watch .html, .md. Add whatever extensions you want.
  • -L is only required if you running your developing environment on virtual machine, such as Vagrant, VirtualBox.
  • --ignore public/ is important, otherwise, once you generated new static files, Nodemon will detect updates in public folder and start generate again, infinite loop…
  • --exec 'hexo generate' is the main command let Nodemon knows how suppose it to execute the program, inside hexo server, you can change it to whatever you currently using, for more information, check at Hexo Server

Finally

On production, you could consider to use forever to start Hexo daemon, the command I use is

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forever start --uid blog --append -c 'hexo server -s -p 80' ./

After you get new blog and pull from upstream, run hexo generate and your blog should get updated.