Restart node childprocess with changed files

Question

Im forking my nodejs process into 4 child-processes. One of this child-processes is for testing purposes The others are production.

Is there a way to restart the child-process with taking the changed files into account without having to restart the whole nodeprocess?

You cannot just kill your spawned process and then restart it? It should use the latest files then.. — Anton Harald, Apr 02 '16 at 09:38
@AntonHarald is that so? tbh i didnt tried yet, because it seemed illogical to me — InsOp, Apr 02 '16 at 09:41
I didn't try it. But I'm quite sure - if I understand your problem correctly. Forking seems to be like spawning, just better suited for nodejs processes in particular. So if I do var cp = require("child_process"); var a = cp.spawn("myapp"); a.on('data'.... ; a.kill(); then, change the code of myapp and do the same thing for var b, I should get the latest version of myapp running. — Anton Harald, Apr 02 '16 at 10:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

See a detailed description how to communicate with forked node-js processes from within a node process here.

The question was, if code-changes in a forked process are taken in account, when the fork is restarted. Yes they are.

once you start a new fork via

var sub = require("child_process").fork("my_module.js");

the current code is read from the actual file. You can stop the fork via sub.disconnect() and reload it again.

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