How to gracefully restart a NodeJS server? - node.js

Question

Currently, my prod environment for a side project is a git repo, where I pull in some code, manually kill the server with Ctrl-C, and restart it manually.
I realize there are a lot of things wrong with this. For instance, what if a user is still in the middle of doing something important and the process is crunching sensitive data, and I just killed it?!
When I used node v0.4.x there was a nice Cluster module that could restart the server gracefully, when the application is in a quiet state. In v0.6.x the Cluster module is built into node, but it's really, really bare, and doesn't have the graceful restart ability.
Anyone know how I can gracefully restart a nodejs server in v0.6.x?

Answer 1

You can handle POSIX signals in node code.
See in the example code, that will handle SIGINT (Ctrl-C for instance) as a STOP signal for all cluster workers, and SIGUSR2 will just restart all workers
So, issuing kill -SIGUSR2 PID, where PID is node master PID will restart all cluster
module.exports = function(app) {
var cluster = require('cluster');
var numCPUs = require('os').cpus().length;
var workerList = new Array();
var sigkill = false;
if (cluster.isMaster) {
for (var i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) {
var env = process.env;
var worker = cluster.fork(env);
workerList.push(worker);
}
process.on('SIGUSR2',function(){
console.log("Received SIGUSR2 from system");
console.log("There are " + workerList.length + " workers running");
workerList.forEach(function(worker){
console.log("Sending STOP message to worker PID=" + worker.pid);
worker.send({cmd: "stop"});
});
});
process.on('SIGINT',function(){
sigkill = true;
process.exit();
});
cluster.on('death', function(worker) {
if (sigkill) {
logger.warn("SIGKINT received - not respawning workers");
return;
}
var newWorker = cluster.fork();
console.log('Worker ' + worker.pid + ' died and it will be re-spawned');
removeWorkerFromListByPID(worker.pid);
workerList.push(newWorker);
});
} else {
process.on('message', function(msg) {
if (msg.cmd && msg.cmd == 'stop') {
console.log("Received STOP signal from master");
app.close();
process.exit();
}
});
app.listen(3000);
}
function removeWorkerFromListByPID(pid) {
var counter = -1;
workerList.forEach(function(worker){
++counter;
if (worker.pid === pid) {
workerList.splice(counter, 1);
}
});
}
}

Answer 2

There's a module named Forever.
That can gracefully restart the process. I suppose then you can somehow run several instances with cluster (one on each core) and use Forever to monitor / restart them.
This is just an option I found; I'm open to suggestions!

Answer 3

There's also a module named PM2. It has the ability to stop all processes in a cluster.