Restart an external process from within a nodejs app (linux)

Question

Say that I am running a process from the command line (NOT a nodejs app):

myProcess doSomething --withParam1

I am also running a nodejs app that connects to this process (rpc).

node myApp

myProcess will randomly silently fail to work properly without crashing and myApp will detect it. I need myApp to be able to restart myProcess (kill it and start it again). After I restarted myProcess, myApp will also restart itself using pm2 (I am already handling the pm2 restart part for the nodejs app - my issue is that I cannot use pm2 to restart myProcess since it is not a nodejs app). Also, I cannot change the code of myProcess since it is a 3rd party software.

How can I restart the external process from my nodejs app?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 12 '22 at 12:58

I ended up using process.kill to kill the process and nodejs child process to restart it.

To find the pid of the process before killing it, I used this:

const childProcess = require('child_process');

function printPid() {
    childProcess.exec('pidof -s myProcess', function(error, stdout, stderr) {
        if (error) {
            console.log(error);
        } else {
            console.log(stdout);
        }
    });
}

Restart an external process from within a nodejs app (linux)

1 Answers1