node-prefork

Start a node.js process in the background

node-prefork seeks to provide an easy API for starting a node.js process in the background, independent of any controlling terminal session.

Limitations

This module will not currently work on Windows, at all - but it will, soon. We're working on it.

This module is called prefork for a reason. When using fork(2) on a unix system, the current process is cloned, file descriptors and all - however, the new child process is single-threaded. If you open a file asynchronously in node.js, it gets opened by a thread pool; if you fork after doing this, you cannot rely upon that file descriptor to still exist, since the new forked child is now single-threaded.

This module does not provide any sort of process-watching functionality. While it could certainly be used to build a process watcher, your application is on its own after being started with prefork().

This leaves us with a few simple rules:

• Use prefork() as close to the start of your program as is possible.
• If you need to perform I/O beforehand, do it synchronously.
• Nothing created on the thread pool before prefork() is called will reliably exist afterwards.
• Without a separate solution to restart your process when it crashes, there's no guarantee of uptime. If your process is stable, it could run for months, but the first time it crashes, it's done.

If these rules are followed, everything should be nice and stable.

Installation

Installation is easy via npm:

 npm install prefork

If you want the git repo:

 git clone https://github.com/AvianFlu/node-prefork
 cd node-prefork
 node-gyp configure build

If you do not have node-gyp installed, simply substitute node-waf in the command above.

Usage

Using prefork is easy - just require it, and call it before your main application logic starts.

 
var http = require('http'),
    prefork = require('prefork');
 
var pid = prefork();
 
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.end('I am a backgrounded HTTP server, running as ' + pid);
}).listen(8080);
 

prefork() will perform all necessary actions to background your process, and return the new pid.

stdio redirection

prefork also allows for various configurations of redirected stdio.

To simply log all output to a file:

 
var pid = prefork({
  stdout: 'output.log'
});
 
console.log('Started successfully, new pid is %d', pid);
 

If only stdout is provided, stderr will be redirected to the same place. To separate stderr from stdout, provide a stderr option as well.

 
prefork({
  stdout: 'output.log',
  stderr: 'errors.log'
});
 

If a stdin option is provided, then the file is opened, read, and its data becomes available as data events on the process.stdin stream. This simple example would log the data from inputfile to the process' new stdout, which in this case is redirected to outputfile.

 
prefork({
  stdin: 'inputfile',
  stdout: 'outputfile'
});
 
process.stdin.resume();
process.stdin.on('data', function (data) {
  console.log(data.toString());
});
 

custom fds

If you're feeling adventurous, an array of integer file descriptors can also be passed to prefork(). Note that this will override any filename options that have been passed - note also that passing random integers that aren't real file descriptors is not a good idea.

var fd = require('fs').openSync('output.log', 'a');
 
prefork({
  customFds: [ -1, fd, -1 ]
});
 

If a value of -1 is passed for any of the file descriptors, as in the example above, that file descriptor will be nulled. This example nulls stdin and stderr, but redirects stdout to a file.