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Workflow Tips

Servers are interesting because they're always running. A lot of the code we've written in Boot.dev up to this point has acted more like a command line tool: it runs, does its thing, and then exits.

Servers are different. They run forever, waiting for requests to come in, processing them, sending responses, and then waiting for the next request. If they didn't work this way, websites and apps would be down and unavailable all the time!

Debugging a Server

Debugging a CLI app is simple:

  1. Write some code
  2. Build and run the code
  3. See if it did what you expected
  4. If it didn't, add some logging or fix the code, and go back to step 2

Debugging a server is a little different. The simplest way (minimal tooling) is to:

  1. Write some code
  2. Build and run the code
  3. Send a request to the server using a browser or some other HTTP client
  4. See if it did what you expected
  5. If it didn't, add some logging or fix the code, and go back to step 2

Make sure you're testing your server by hitting endpoints in the browser before submitting your answers.

Restarting a Server

I like to add scripts to package.json to make it easier to start the server (which we did earlier).

{
...
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "npx tsc && node dist/index.js"
  },
...
}

This way, I can just run npm run dev to compile and start the server.

To stop the server, I use Ctrl+C. This sends a signal to the server, telling it to stop. The server then exits.

To start it again, I just run the same command.

CLI Tip

If you didn't know, you can continuously press the ↑ key on the command line to see the commands you've previously run. That way you don't need to retype commands that you use often!