Detect when parent process exits

Question

I will have a parent process that is used to handle webserver restarts. It will signal the child to stop listening for new requests, the child will signal the parent that it has stopped listening, then the parent will signal the new child that it can start listening. In this way, we can accomplish less than 100ms down time for a restart of that level (I have a zero-downtime grandchild restart also, but that is not always enough of a restart).

The service manager will kill the parent when it is time for shutdown. How can the child detect that the parent has ended?

The signals are sent using stdin and stdout of the child process. Perhaps I can detect the end of an stdin stream? I am hoping to avoid a polling interval. Also, I would like this to be a really quick detection if possible.

Answer 1

a simpler solution could be by registering for 'disconnect' in the child process

process.on('disconnect', function() {
  console.log('parent exited')
  process.exit();
});