ng serve: how to change inspector port?

Question

When I start ng serve server on the command line it fails with:

Starting inspector on localhost:7777 failed: address already in use

This is expected, because there is really already another instance running.

So how can I change the inspector port for this instance?

I've tried to set the env-var NODE_OPTIONS to

• '--inspect=7888'
• '--inspect=localhost:7888'

both had no effect: i.e. it was still failing with

Starting inspector on localhost:7777 failed: address already in use

Note: I do NOT want to change the application port: e.g. ng serve --port 5600 - it's only about the node-inspector port

Answer 1

tldr;

Since ng serve server uses nrwl/node:execute I must use the nrwl port option:

ng serve server --port 7888

and not the ng serve port:

ng serve  --port 7888 server

Details:

When I start ng serve server, then ng will

• check the angular.json file for the project server
• in this project the architect-serve section is relevant

in my case, this is

"serve": {
  "builder": "@nrwl/node:execute",
  "options": {
    "buildTarget": "server:build"
  }
}

Thus, ng will just start the @nrwl/node:execute bulder, which supports the option -port

So to summarize, there are 2 port options available

ng serve -port 5600 server -port 7888

• 5600 is the application port (which I need not chagne in this case)
• 7888 is the inspector port, which I must change in this case