How to restart a node.js server

Solution 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.

Solution 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

Solution 3:

In this case you are restarting your node.js server often because it's in active development and you are making changes all the time. There is a great hot reload script that will handle this for you by watching all your .js files and restarting your node.js server if any of those files have changed. Just the ticket for rapid development and test.

The script and explanation on how to use it are at here at Draco Blue.

Solution 4:

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)