Keep application alive forever with PM2

[NeHo]

PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks.

More info: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2

Installing PM2 and starting our application

To install PM2 enter next command

npm install pm2 -g

After the installation lets start our application with PM2, we will also add a name for our website, in this case it is named cod4xwebadmin

Navigate to the application root and type (if you have multiple applications repeat the step for each)

pm2 start npm --name "cod4xwebadmin" -- start

Our application is now started, even if we exit putty the website will still be alive.

PM2 Commands

Since we added a name cod4xwebadmin we can now execute pm2 commands only for this application (if you run multiple applications you can add a unique name for every application and this way you can handle them individually)

Some basic commands:

Start the cod4xwebadmin application

pm2 start npm --name "cod4xwebadmin" -- start

Stop

pm2 stop cod4xwebadmin

See the console log when it is started

pm2 log cod4xwebadmin

if you would have another application differently named then replace cod4xwebadmin with the correct name

Or if you would like to start | stop all applications at once you can use all instead the application names, for example stop all applications you type

pm2 stop all

What if i restart my server, will the application be started automatically?

In order to start on system boot we need to execute next commands
Make sure you have started all applications and they run before you execute the commands

To detect available init systems on your machine and generate a configuration, use:

pm2 startup

Save your process list with:

pm2 save

That's it, with this 2 commands our website will automatically start on system start