Lil-pids NPM | npm.io

lil-pids

Dead simple process manager with few features

npm install -g lil-pids

omg

First create a file with the commands you wanna have running

# assuming this file is called 'services'
node server.js
node another-server.js

Then simply start lil-pids with the filename

lil-pids ./services

It'll watch the file so every time you update it, old processes no longer referenced from the file will be shutdown and any new ones will be spawned.

lil-pids will forward all stdout, stderr to its own stdout, stderr prefixed with the process id.

It will also tell you when a command has been spawned, exited and finally it will restart processes when the crash/end.

lil-pids can also write the pids of the current running processes to a file. Just pass the pids filename as the 2nd argument

lil-pids ./services ./pids

Then you can simply cat ./pids to see what is running at the moment.

That's it!

Pro-tips

Spawn lil-pids ./services ./pids with your OS' service monitor. Then it'll startup at boot and every thing you need to do is edit the services file.
Add > output.log and 2> errors.log to the end of a command to persist logs to files.
Cat the pids file and use kill to restart a running process. Use ps / top to check how something is running.
Add # in front of a service to disable it temporarily.

Start on server boot

To start lil-pids on server boot (or restart it when it crashes) you can add it using systemd.

npm install -g add-to-systemd
sudo $(which add-to-systemd) -u $(whoami) -e PATH=$PATH lil-pids $(which lil-pids) ./services ./pids
sudo systemctl start lil-pids