The process manager + task scheduler approach I posted a year ago works well with some one-off service installations. But recently I started to design system in a micro-service fashion, with many small services talking to each other via IPC. So manually configuring each service has become unbearable.
Towards the goal of installing services without manual configuration, I created serman, a command line tool (install with npm i -g serman) to install an executable as a service. All you need to write (and only write once) is a simple service configuration file along with your executable. Run
serman install <path_to_config_file>
will install the service. stdout and stderr are all logged. For more info, take a look at the project website.
A working configuration file is very simple, as demonstrated below. But it also has many useful features such as <env> and <persistent_env> below.
<service>
<id>hello</id>
<name>hello</name>
<description>This service runs the hello application</description>
<executable>node.exe</executable>
<!--
{{dir}} will be expanded to the containing directory of your
config file, which is normally where your executable locates
-->
<arguments>"{{dir}}\hello.js"</arguments>
<logmode>rotate</logmode>
<!-- OPTIONAL FEATURE:
NODE_ENV=production will be an environment variable
available to your application, but not visible outside
of your application
-->
<env name="NODE_ENV" value="production"/>
<!-- OPTIONAL FEATURE:
FOO_SERVICE_PORT=8989 will be persisted as an environment
variable machine-wide.
-->
<persistent_env name="FOO_SERVICE_PORT" value="8989" />
</service>