How to force pm2 to restart after a specific amount of time?

Question

I am using PM2 to keep my node.js apps running.

Is there any way to have PM2 restart my app every 1 hour?

Answer 1

Put the code below in pm2.js and start it with pm2 start pm2.js

    var pm2 = require('pm2');

  pm2.connect(function(err) {
    if (err) throw err;

  setTimeout(function worker() {
    console.log("Restarting app...");
    pm2.restart('app', function() {});
    setTimeout(worker, 1000);
    }, 1000);
  });

More about this can be found here.

Additional resources:

• How can I programmatically shutdown a node program and restart it?
• Programmatically watch and restart node server

Answer 2

Use crontab.
Append this under your crontab file (run with crontab -e):

0 * * * * pm2 restart yourappname

Note that if you don't want to increment your pm2 restart counter, you can do something like this:

0 * * * * pm2 stop yourappname && pm2 start yourappname

Explanation:

0: on the 0th minute of the hour
*: every hour
*: every day
*: every month
*: every day of the week