When you are working on a Node project, you might want to run some tasks in parallel. Fortunately, there is a package for that: npm-run-all
.
npm-run-all
contains three commands:
npm-run-all
- You can run this command by passing the following arguments:npm-run-all -p
to run commands in parallel;npm-run-all -s
to run commands sequentially.run -p
- Shorthand to run commands in parallel.run -s
- Shorthand to run command sequentially.
For example, in order to start your development server you might need to have two commands, one for the frontend server and one for the backend server. Instead of having to start them individually, you can run them in parallel. Let’s install npm-run-all
and run the servers in parallel using the example above:
-
Install
npm-run-all
by typing at the command prompt:npm install npm-run-all --save-dev
oryarn add npm-run-all --dev
. -
In your
package.json
file under the scripts section, we have a frontend command to run a React application (start:client
) and a backend server that is built with Node (start:server
). In order to run both of them in parallel, we would type the following in thestart
command:"scripts": { "start": "run-p start:client start:server", "start:client": "react-scripts start", "start:server": "node src/api/apiServer.js" }
-
Save the changes in the file and then type
npm run start
oryarn run start
and both of the servers should be running.