How do I run a Node.js application as its own process?

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2016 answer: nearly every Linux distribution comes with systemd, which means forever, monit, PM2, etc. are no longer necessary – your OS already handles these tasks.

Make a myapp.service file (replacing ‘myapp’ with your app’s name, obviously):

[Unit]
Description=My app

[Service]
ExecStart=/var/www/myapp/app.js
Restart=always
User=nobody
# Note Debian/Ubuntu uses 'nogroup', RHEL/Fedora uses 'nobody'
Group=nogroup
Environment=PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
Environment=NODE_ENV=production
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/myapp

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note if you’re new to Unix: /var/www/myapp/app.js should have #!/usr/bin/env node on the very first line and have the executable mode turned on chmod +x myapp.js.

Copy your service file into the /etc/systemd/system folder.

Tell systemd about the new service with systemctl daemon-reload.

Start it with systemctl start myapp.

Enable it to run on boot with systemctl enable myapp.

See logs with journalctl -u myapp

This is taken from How we deploy node apps on Linux, 2018 edition, which also includes commands to generate an AWS/DigitalOcean/Azure CloudConfig to build Linux/node servers (including the .service file).

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