Close another process from node on Windows

Question

How can I kill a process from node on Windows?

I'm making a updater. It needs close a windows executable (.exe) to download the updates. (The update process is download and overwrite). I read that this is possible with process.kill(pid[, signal])

But, How can I get the PID of the process if I know the name of the process?

Answer 1

According to the documentation, you simply access the property.

process.kill(process.pid, 'SIGKILL');

This is a theoretical, untested, psuedo function that may help explain what I have in mind

exec('tasklist', (err, out, code) => { //tasklist is windows, but run command to get proccesses
    const id = processIdFromTaskList(processName, out); //get process id from name and parse from output of executed command
    process.kill(id, "SIGKILL"); //rekt
});

Answer 2

Use node-windows to get pid of process you want to kill so that you can call process.kill. The library also provides an api to kill task.