How do I run a node.js app as a background service?

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

_x000D_ Copying my own answer from How do I run a Node.js application as its own process? 2015 answer: nearly every Linux distro comes with systemd, which means forever, monit, PM2, etc are no longer necessary - your OS already handles these tasks. Make a myapp.service file (replacing 'myapp' with your app's name, obviously): [Unit] Description=My app [Service] ExecStart=/var/www/myapp/app.js Restart=always User=nobody # Note Debian/Ubuntu uses 'nogroup', RHEL/Fedora uses 'nobody' Group=nogroup Environment=PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin Environment=NODE_ENV=production WorkingDirectory=/var/www/myapp [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target Note if you're new to Unix: /var/www/myapp/app.js should have #!/usr/bin/env node on the very first line. Copy your service file into the /etc/systemd/system. Start it with systemctl start myapp. Enable it to run on boot with systemctl enable myapp. See logs with journalctl -u myapp This is taken from How we deploy node apps on Linux, 2018 edition, which also includes commands to generate an AWS/DigitalOcean/Azure CloudConfig to build Linux/node servers (including the .service file).