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Since this post has gotten a lot of attention over the years, I've listed the top solutions per platform at the bottom of this post.
Original post:
I want my node.js server to run in the background, i.e.: when I close my terminal I want my server to keep running. I've googled this and came up with this tutorial, however it doesn't work as intended. So instead of using that daemon script, I thought I just used the output redirection (the 2>&1 >> file part), but this too does not exit - I get a blank line in my terminal, like it's waiting for output/errors.
I've also tried to put the process in the background, but as soon as I close my terminal the process is killed as well.
So how can I leave it running when I shut down my local computer?
Top solutions:
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Run command systemctl start node-app-service-name to start the service, the node-app-service-name is the service file name as above. If you want to run node in background every time when the Linux OS startup, you can run the command systemctl enable node-app-service-name in a terminal to achieve this.
var Service = require('node-windows'). Service; // Create a new service object var svc = new Service({ name:'Hello World', description: 'The nodejs.org example web server. ', script: 'C:\\path\\to\\helloworld. js' }); // Listen for the "install" event, which indicates the // process is available as a service.
js application locally after closing the terminal or Application, to run the nodeJS application permanently. We use NPM modules such as forever or PM2 to ensure that a given script runs continuously. NPM is a Default Package manager for Node.
Copying my own answer from How do I run a Node.js application as its own process?
2015 answer: nearly every Linux distro comes with systemd, which means forever, monit, PM2, etc are no longer necessary - your OS already handles these tasks.
Make a myapp.service file (replacing 'myapp' with your app's name, obviously):
[Unit] Description=My app [Service] ExecStart=/var/www/myapp/app.js Restart=always User=nobody # Note Debian/Ubuntu uses 'nogroup', RHEL/Fedora uses 'nobody' Group=nogroup Environment=PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin Environment=NODE_ENV=production WorkingDirectory=/var/www/myapp [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target Note if you're new to Unix: /var/www/myapp/app.js should have #!/usr/bin/env node on the very first line and have the executable mode turned on chmod +x myapp.js.
Copy your service file into the /etc/systemd/system.
Start it with systemctl start myapp.
Enable it to run on boot with systemctl enable myapp.
See logs with journalctl -u myapp
This is taken from How we deploy node apps on Linux, 2018 edition, which also includes commands to generate an AWS/DigitalOcean/Azure CloudConfig to build Linux/node servers (including the .service file).
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