Gatsby: Nice to have: hot reload / restart server when gatsby-node.js updated

[alexgreenland]

Summary

Would be a nice-to-have productivity boost with hot reloading when gatsby-node.js is updated.

Motivation

Gatsby detects a lot of changes and hot reloads, so it would make sense to restart the server when doing common things like adding new node fields.

[sidharthachatterjee]

This is actually pretty tricky to do since gatsby-node.js does a lot more than creating pages. As a result, it's difficult to localise the hot reloading behaviour to _just_ node fields or adding pages.

Related discussion at https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/8163

[alexgreenland]

I'd be happy with a complete teardown of the server and restart if state can get corrupted.

[marvinjude]

I believe any change to gatsby-node.js will always require a restart for it to take effect .

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[guilhermedecampo]

This would be pretty nice indeed. Anyone found a good setup?

[d4rekanguok]

Hey folks, I've just quickly put together a plugin to restart Gatsby's process automatically when gatsby-* file changes: https://github.com/d4rekanguok/gatsby-plugin-node-reload

It watches your gatsby-* files (chokidar), spawn a new detached child process on change, kill the previous one while using the same stdout. The caveat is that when you want to end this process you'd have to do it manually (kill -15 {PID} on macOS). The plugin will log out the current PID at the beginning of each process.

[dandv]

Gatsby now has a feature to prompt the user to restart, when gatsby-node.js has changed.