How to stop app that node.js express 'npm start'

Question

Yes, npm provides for a stop script too:

npm help npm-scripts

prestop, stop, poststop: Run by the npm stop command.

Set one of the above in your package.json, and then use npm stop

npm help npm-stop

You can make this really simple if you set in app.js,

process.title = myApp;

And, then in scripts.json,

"scripts": {
    "start": "app.js"
    , "stop": "pkill --signal SIGINT myApp"
}

That said, if this was me, I'd be using pm2 or something the automatically handled this on the basis of a git push.

All the other solutions here are OS dependent. An independent solution for any OS uses socket.io as follows.

package.json has two scripts:

"scripts": {
  "start": "node server.js",
  "stop": "node server.stop.js"
}

server.js - Your usual express stuff lives here

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const server = http.createServer(app);
server.listen(80, () => {
  console.log('HTTP server listening on port 80');
});

// Now for the socket.io stuff - NOTE THIS IS A RESTFUL HTTP SERVER
// We are only using socket.io here to respond to the npmStop signal
// To support IPC (Inter Process Communication) AKA RPC (Remote P.C.)

const io = require('socket.io')(server);
io.on('connection', (socketServer) => {
  socketServer.on('npmStop', () => {
    process.exit(0);
  });
});

server.stop.js

const io = require('socket.io-client');
const socketClient = io.connect('http://localhost'); // Specify port if your express server is not using default port 80

socketClient.on('connect', () => {
  socketClient.emit('npmStop');
  setTimeout(() => {
    process.exit(0);
  }, 1000);
});

Test it out

npm start (to start your server as usual)

npm stop (this will now stop your running server)

The above code has not been tested (it is a cut down version of my code, my code does work) but hopefully it works as is. Either way, it provides the general direction to take if you want to use socket.io to stop your server.

On MAC OS X(/BSD): you can try to use the lsof (list open files) command

$ sudo lsof -nPi -sTCP:LISTEN

and so

$ kill -9 3320

When I tried the suggested solution I realized that my app name was truncated. I read up on process.title in the nodejs documentation (https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/process.html#process_process_title) and it says

On Linux and OS X, it's limited to the size of the binary name plus the length of the command line arguments because it overwrites the argv memory.

My app does not use any arguments, so I can add this line of code to my app.js

process.title = process.argv[2];

and then add these few lines to my package.json file

  "scripts": {
    "start": "node app.js this-name-can-be-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be",
    "stop": "killall -SIGINT this-name-can-be-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be"
  },

to use really long process names. npm start and npm stop work, of course npm stop will always terminate all running processes, but that is ok for me.

This is a mintty version problem alternatively use cmd. To kill server process just run this command:

    taskkill -F -IM node.exe

Check with netstat -nptl all processes

Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:27017         0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1736/mongod     
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1594/sshd       
tcp6       0      0 :::3977                 :::*                    LISTEN      6231/nodejs     
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      1594/sshd       
tcp6       0      0 :::3200                 :::*                    LISTEN      5535/nodejs 

And it simply kills the process by the PID reference.... In my case I want to stop the 6231/nodejs so I execute the following command:

kill -9 6231

If you've already tried ctrl + c and it still doesn't work, you might want to try this. This has worked for me.

1. Run command-line as an Administrator. Then run the command below to find the processID (PID) you want to kill. Type your port number in <yourPortNumber>

   netstat -ano | findstr :<yourPortNumber>

2. Then you execute this command after you have identified the PID.

   taskkill /PID <typeYourPIDhere> /F

Kudos to @mit $ingh from http://www.callstack.in/tech/blog/windows-kill-process-by-port-number-157