For those of you who develop on NodeBB, you may be interested to know that v0.7.0 (or the latest master commits) ship with a Gruntfile, and should substantially reduce times in between server restarts.
Thanks to the hard work put in by @psychobunny, grunt will now detect whether a change has been made to any files under its control, and refresh that aspect of NodeBB accordingly. If you've made a template change, only the templates will be recompiled, and the client-side scripts and stylesheets are left untouched.
I believe @frissdiegurke may be interested in this 
Note: Please keep in mind this is for development purposes only. The official way to run NodeBB is still via the nodebb executable. (e.g. ./nodebb start)
Grunt!? Why not any of the billions of other choices you could have made for this?! /s
Down for other solutions (believe me, it was a pain in the ass trying to figure this out for NodeBB's compilation steps)
I'm just happy we lowered our restart time from > 10s to about 2s.
It seems to be breaking the javascript for me
Sorry to revisit this old thread, but regarding the docs, should the grunt command be used in place of ./nodebb dev?
Ignore me. The docs answer my question:
Run grunt to start up NodeBB and watch for code changes.
