terminate

A reliable (tested) way to Terminate a Node.js Process (and all Child Processes) based on the Process ID

[![Node.js Version][node-version-image]][node-version-url] [node-version-image]: https://img.shields.io/node/v/listdirs.svg?style=flat [node-version-url]: http://nodejs.org/download/

Usage

Install from NPM

npm install terminate --save

In your script

var terminate = require('terminate');
terminate(process.pid, function(err, done){
  if(err) { // you will get an error if you did not supply a valid process.pid
   console.log("Oopsy: " + err); // handle errors in your preferred way.
 }
 else {
   console.log(done); // do what you do best!
 }
})

tl;dr

Why?

In our Faster project we run the server using a child process. When we want to re-start the server,
we needed to ensure the process (and any Child Processes) were Terminateed before re-start.

Research

Background Reading

• How to terminate node processes: https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/1172 (history lesson)
• nodejs exec command failing with no useful error message: https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/4590

Useful StackOverflow Questions/Answers

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26694100/why-does-my-node-app-process-keep-getting-stopped-when-i-use-forever
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18275809/kill-all-child-process-when-node-process-is-killed
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26004519/why-doesnt-my-node-js-process-terminate-once-all-listeners-have-been-removed
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14319724/nodejs-exec-command-failing-with-no-useful-error-message
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9275654/how-many-child-processes-can-a-node-js-cluster-spawn-on-a-64bit-wintel-pc

Background / Motivation

While building the Faster module we decided to use Child Process(es) to run the application we are observing.
As a result, we need to be able to kill those processes in order to re-start the app.

Why not use an Existing Module?

We investigated using terminate: https://github.com/indexzero/terminate/ it was un-maintained and had no tests so we submitted an issue offering to update the module with tests.
Charlie replied welcoming an update so we submitted a Pull Request with 100% test coverage

Other potential modules:

• nexpect: https://github.com/nodejitsu/nexpect
• node-ps: https://github.com/neekey/ps (has basic tests but no cov)
• tree-kill: https://www.npmjs.com/package/tree-kill (no tests!!)

Name

Terminate seemed like the best (of the available) name,
if you have a better suggestion, please share!