How to run Node.js as a background process and never die?

Solution 1:

nohup node server.js > /dev/null 2>&1 &

1. nohup means: Do not terminate this process even when the stty is cut off.
2. > /dev/null means: stdout goes to /dev/null (which is a dummy device that does not record any output).
3. 2>&1 means: stderr also goes to the stdout (which is already redirected to /dev/null). You may replace &1 with a file path to keep a log of errors, e.g.: 2>/tmp/myLog
4. & at the end means: run this command as a background task.

Solution 2:

Simple solution (if you are not interested in coming back to the process, just want it to keep running):

nohup node server.js &

There's also the jobs command to see an indexed list of those backgrounded processes. And you can kill a backgrounded process by running kill %1 or kill %2 with the number being the index of the process.

Powerful solution (allows you to reconnect to the process if it is interactive):

screen

You can then detach by pressing Ctrl+a+d and then attach back by running screen -r

Also consider the newer alternative to screen, tmux.

Solution 3:

You really should try to use screen. It is a bit more complicated than just doing nohup long_running &, but understanding screen once you never come back again.

Start your screen session at first:

user@host:~$ screen

Run anything you want:

wget http://mirror.yandex.ru/centos/4.6/isos/i386/CentOS-4.6-i386-binDVD.iso

Press ctrl+A and then d. Done. Your session keeps going on in background.

You can list all sessions by screen -ls, and attach to some by screen -r 20673.pts-0.srv command, where 0673.pts-0.srv is an entry list.

Solution 4:

This is an old question, but is high ranked on Google. I almost can't believe on the highest voted answers, because running a node.js process inside a screen session, with the & or even with the nohup flag -- all of them -- are just workarounds.

Specially the screen/tmux solution, which should really be considered an amateur solution. Screen and Tmux are not meant to keep processes running, but for multiplexing terminal sessions. It's fine, when you are running a script on your server and want to disconnect. But for a node.js server your don't want your process to be attached to a terminal session. This is too fragile. To keep things running you need to daemonize the process!

There are plenty of good tools to do that.

PM2: http://pm2.keymetrics.io/

# basic usage
$ npm install pm2 -g
$ pm2 start server.js

# you can even define how many processes you want in cluster mode:
$ pm2 start server.js -i 4

# you can start various processes, with complex startup settings
# using an ecosystem.json file (with env variables, custom args, etc):
$ pm2 start ecosystem.json

One big advantage I see in favor of PM2 is that it can generate the system startup script to make the process persist between restarts:

$ pm2 startup [platform]

Where platform can be ubuntu|centos|redhat|gentoo|systemd|darwin|amazon.

forever.js: https://github.com/foreverjs/forever

# basic usage
$ npm install forever -g
$ forever start app.js

# you can run from a json configuration as well, for
# more complex environments or multi-apps
$ forever start development.json

Init scripts:

I'm not go into detail about how to write a init script, because I'm not an expert in this subject and it'd be too long for this answer, but basically they are simple shell scripts, triggered by OS events. You can read more about this here

Docker:

Just run your server in a Docker container with -d option and, voilá, you have a daemonized node.js server!

Here is a sample Dockerfile (from node.js official guide):

FROM node:argon

# Create app directory
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app

# Install app dependencies
COPY package.json /usr/src/app/
RUN npm install

# Bundle app source
COPY . /usr/src/app

EXPOSE 8080
CMD [ "npm", "start" ]

Then build your image and run your container:

$ docker build -t <your username>/node-web-app .
$ docker run -p 49160:8080 -d <your username>/node-web-app

Hope this helps somebody landing on this page. Always use the proper tool for the job. It'll save you a lot of headaches and over hours!