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

Question

I connect to the linux server via putty SSH. I tried to run it as a background process like this:

$ node server.js &

However, after 2.5

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Nohup and screen offer great light solutions to running Node.js in the background. Node.js process manager (PM2) is a handy tool for deployment. Install it with npm globally on your system:

npm install pm2 -g

to run a Node.js app as a daemon:

pm2 start app.js

You can optionally link it to Keymetrics.io a monitoring SAAS made by Unitech.