How do I run a node.js app as a background service?

Question

Since this post has gotten a lot of attention over the years, I\'ve listed the top solutions per platform at the bottom of this post.

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Original post

Answer 1

I use Supervisor for development. It just works. When ever you make changes to a .js file Supervisor automatically restarts your app with those changes loaded.

Here's a link to its Github page

Install :

sudo npm install supervisor -g

You can easily make it watch other extensions with -e. Another command I use often is -i to ignore certain folders.

You can use nohup and supervisor to make your node app run in the background even after you log out.

sudo nohup supervisor myapp.js &