I am making a call from my react app to a node server that needs to run a command on some physical hardware. The hardware takes about three minutes to complete its routine however the request always times out in my react app after only two. The hardware is connected over serial and will print "done" to the command line when finished so I need some way to see when that happens in my node server.
Ive tried increasing the setTimeout on my node server but to my understanding that only impacts the request it makes to other servers and not the requests made to it. I've also tried spawning a child process rather than running exec however I'm not sure how to access it in a later api call if it is scoped into the initial calls function.
I have a function run in my server that looks like this:
function run(command) {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
exec(command, (err, stdout, stderr) => {
if(err){
reject(stderr);
}
resolve(stdout);
});
});
}
My api endpoint exec uses run like so:
app.post('/api/exec', (req, res) => {
req.setTimeout(0); //some commands take a long time, so we shouldnt time out the response
if(req.body.command){
run(req.body.command)
.then(data => {
return res.status(201).send({
message: data
});
}).catch(err => {
return res.status(500).send({
message: err
});
});
} else {
return res.status(400).send({
message: "exec requires a command member"
})
}
});
Finally, I am calling the api from my react app with the following:
execute = (c) => {
fetch(`/api/exec`, {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json'
},
body: JSON.stringify({
command: c
})
}).then (resp => {
... do stuff with my app ...
I expect that the server would run my command until completion and then respond with the stdout from running the command, however my client application times out after ~two minutes of calling the execute function.
Several questions already have good answers regarding how to decrease the timeout time for an api call by wrapping in a timeout promise, however this method does not allow me to exceed the two minute default timeout time.
