How can I get --debug and "watch" to coexist nicely?

Question

I realize there are a lot of related questions on this. None that I've found address this question.

I'd like my process to restart with --debug on when my code changes. Two commands in my package.json:

"debug-no-inspect": "API_PORT=5566 API_LOGLEVEL=DEBUG  node --debug dist/index.js  | bunyan -o short",
"watch": "watch 'npm run debug-no-inspect' ./src -d --wait=1",

OK those work nicely by themselves and work fine without --debug, but together the --debug will cause an EADDRINUSE error:

 Error: listen EADDRINUSE :::5858

Increasing the time to 4 seconds didn't do it. It works fine if I Ctrl-C and kill the watch and restart but that defeats the purpose. Is there a way to programmatically release that debugger port before restarting the process without killing all my node processes?

My best stab at this so far: Add a silly env variable (ID=9877876 or FINDME=alksdjflaksjdfl) to the start command and then use that to find the process later and kill it before restarting:

"watch": "watch 'kill $(ps a | grep [ID]=9877876 | cut -d \" \" -f 1) && npm run debug-no-inspect' ./src -d"

However this does not work. The command works by itself but not with watch. Is another library a better choice?

Node 6; OSX; bash

Answer 1

Seems the solution was to remove watch and use nodemon instead:

package.json:

"watch": "nodemon -V  -w config  -w src -e coffee,yaml,properties --exec npm -- run debug", 

Works just great.