CoffeeScript updates not reflected on restart

Question

I'm messing around with a fork of foaas (on github), a little service built with CoffeeScript and Node. I've got it running on an ec2 instance and, as a starting point, have just switched some of the hard-coded string values around in server.coffee.

After making my changes I run the server again with:

coffee server.coffee

The problem is that nothing changes! The strings I have swapped around still reflect their old values. Clearly I am missing some kind of build tool that's in place here. The dir tree looks like so:

├── lib
│   └── operations.coffee
├── LICENSE
├── package.json
├── Procfile
├── public
│   ├── googlead0e382f658e6d8e.html
│   └── index.html
├── README.md
└── server.coffee

From what I've gathered, I need a tool to read the Procfile in order to compile the coffeescript files into js and run them, all-at-once. That's quite an abstract thing to google and my attempts have proved fruitless. How do I get my changes reflected?

I haven't used Node much and haven't used CoffeeScript or Express at all but I have read their related documentation so mostly know what's happening in the code.

Answer 1

Expanded from the comment which solved the issue:

On every change, you can restart the server using Supervisor

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As an additional step, for building your coffee files into js you can use grunt to automate the compilation, and watch changes to the coffee file too.

Answer 2

You'll need foreman to start your Procfile -- you can use node-dev to run your server (which automatically restarts upon changes).

npm install node-dev --save

And to avoid Grunt headaches, you could also specify compile watchers in your Procfile:

web: ./node_modules/node-dev/bin/node-dev server.coffee
coffee: ./node_modules/.bin/coffee --watch --compile --output ./ lib

And to run your Procfile: foreman start -f Procfile

See here for the coffee-script command line usage