What is the correct way to start and stop simple Node.js scripts

Question

I'm trying to create a simple Twitter bot to learn some Node.js skills.

It works fine on my local computer. I start the script with node bot.js and then close it with Ctrl + C.

I've uploaded the files to a server (Krystal hosting). I've ssh'd into the server and then used $ source /home/[username]/nodevenv/twitterbot/10/bin/activate. Which I think puts me into a Node environment (I'm not really clear what is happening here).

From here I can run node bot.js. My Twitter bot runs fine and I can leave the terminal. What I've realised now is that I don't know how to stop this script.

Can someone explain how I should be doing this? Is there a command I can enter to stop the original bot.js process? Since looking into this it looks like perhaps I should have used something like pm2 process manager. Is this correct?

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Thanks, B

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3510673/find-and-kill-a-process-in-one-line-using-bash-and-regex — goto, Feb 15 '20 at 18:48
@goto1 If I run `$ ps` in the virtual environment. I just get two process listed: `3435417 pts/1 00:00:00 bash 3596773 pts/1 00:00:00 ps` I can't see my `bot.js` process listed there. Should I expect it to be? — Ben Jackson, Feb 15 '20 at 19:06
@goto1 because the automatic retweeting functionality of the script is happening. — Ben Jackson, Feb 15 '20 at 19:17
https://medium.com/@mhagemann/how-to-terminate-a-nodejs-process-aa64aba56eb3 — goto, Feb 15 '20 at 19:19
Try `killall -9 node` to kill all the node running in background — Kousika Ganesan, Feb 15 '20 at 19:23

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 15 '20 at 19:52

You can kill it externally by nuking the process from an OS command line or in an OS GUI (exact procedure varies by OS). Ctrl-C from the shell is one version of this, but it can be done without the command shell that it was started in too by nuking the process directly.

Or, you can add a control port (a simple little http server running on a port only accessible locally) that accepts commands that let you do all sorts of things with the server such as extract statistics, shut it down, change the configuration, tell it to clear caches so content updates take effect immediately, etc... Shutting down the server this way allows for a more orderly shut-down from code within the server. You can even stop accepting incoming connections, but wait for existing http connections to complete before shutting down, close databases normally, etc...

Or, you can use a monitoring program such as PM2 or forever that in addition to restarting the server automatically if it should ever crash, they also offer commands for shutting it down too (which will just send it certain signals kind of like Ctrl-C does).

What is the correct way to start and stop simple Node.js scripts

1 Answers1