Here's another solution that mixes ideas from the previous answers. It takes the "kill process" approach while addressing the concern about platform independence.
It relies on the tree-kill package to handle killing the server process tree. I found killing the entire process tree necessary in my projects because some tools (e.g. babel-node) spawn child processes. If you only need to kill a single process, you can replace tree-kill with the built-in process.kill() method.
The solution follows (the first two arguments to spawn() should be modified to reflect the specific recipe for running your server):
build/start-server.js
import { spawn } from 'child_process'
import fs from 'fs'
const child = spawn('node', [
'dist/server.js'
], {
detached: true,
stdio: 'ignore'
})
child.unref()
if (typeof child.pid !== 'undefined') {
fs.writeFileSync('.server.pid', child.pid, {
encoding: 'utf8'
})
}
build/stop-server.js
import fs from 'fs'
import kill from 'tree-kill'
const serverPid = fs.readFileSync('.server.pid', {
encoding: 'utf8'
})
fs.unlinkSync('.server.pid')
kill(serverPid)
package.json
"scripts": {
"start": "babel-node build/start-server.js",
"stop": "babel-node build/stop-server.js"
}
Note that this solution detaches the start script from the server (i.e. npm start will return immediately and not block until the server is stopped). If you prefer the traditional blocking behavior, simply remove the options.detached argument to spawn() and the call to child.unref().