How to restart a node.js server

Question

I've installed and is running a node.js server on osx. I've dled a chat module and is happily running it. I've altered some pieces and need to restart the server to see the effects.

I only know how to restart by closing the terminal window and then reopneing it and then running node chatdemo.js again.

Any way to restart without closing terminal?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If it's just running (not a daemon) then just use Ctrl-C.

If it's daemonized then you could try:

$ ps aux | grep node
you   PID  1.5  0.2  44172  8260 pts/2    S    15:25   0:00 node app.js
$ kill -2 PID

Where PID is replaced by the number in the output of ps.

Answer 2

During development the best way to restart server for seeing changes made is to use nodemon

npm install nodemon -g

nodemon [your app name]

nodemon will watch the files in the directory that nodemon was started, and if they change, it will automatically restart your node application.

Check nodemon git repo: https://github.com/remy/nodemon

Answer 3

I had the same problem and then wrote this shell script which kills all of the existing node processes:

#!/bin/bash
echo "The following node processes were found:"
ps aux | grep " node " | grep -v grep
nodepids=$(ps aux | grep " node " | grep -v grep | cut -c10-15)

echo "OK, so we will stop these process/es now..."

for nodepid in ${nodepids[@]}
do
echo "Stopping PID :"$nodepid
kill -9 $nodepid
done
echo "Done"

After this is saved as a shell script (xxx.sh) file you might want to add it to your PATH as described here.

(Please note that this will kill all of the processes with " node " in it's name except grep's own, so I guess in some cases it may also kill some other processes with a similar name)