I was writing a small Dart web server today, and got tired of constantly restarting it manually: ctrl-`, ctrl-c, up arrow, enter. I mean, it’s not a huge amount of work, but it adds up - and it’s easy to miss a step (or all of them).

After searching and getting into the weeds of how to do hot reload in Dart (which is what Flutter uses), I came across this Reddit comment that shows a much simpler solution:

nodemon -x "dart run bin/server.dart" -e dart

In here:

• nodemon is the application that does the monitoring and executing. Originally written for node, it works with any executable now.
• -x "dart run bin/server.dart" tells it to execute dart run bin/server.dart. Modify that last bit to point to your main Dart file.
• -e dart then tells it to monitor .dart files for changes. If it detects a change, it kills the current process and starts a new one.

Simple, but it works - so highly recommended.