Using PM2 process manager for node.js

 
PM2 (Process Manager 2) https://github.com/Unitech/PM2 is a process manager for Node.js applications. Some of its features are:
· PM2 allows us to run our application as multiple processes, without having to modify our application.
· It has built-in load balancing capabilities for running node.js application in cluster.
· It keeps the application up by restarting the application if it crashes.
· It can start the node application as a service when we restart the server.

 

Note: For this post I used Ubuntu 14.04

 

Installing node.js

Run the below command as root user or use sudo
# curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -


Now run apt-get to install node.js
# apt-get install nodejs


Update 22/07/2015:
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Suppose you want to install a different version of nodejs (at the time of writing this post the default setup was 0.10), for example suppose if I want 0.12, then go to the NodeJS github link:
https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/tree/master/deb

There you will get setup scripts for different versions of NodeJS, for my requirement of version 0.12 the script is setup_0.12, from the script get the link of the script and run the curl command:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nodesource/distributions/master/deb/setup_0.12 | sudo bash -

After that run apt-get install nodejs command.

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For testing cluster I created a small application test.js, this application shows the Process ID of the process which served the request:
For this application I need process module, install process module

 
My test.js file:
var http = require("http");
var process = require('process'); 

function onRequest(request, response){
response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type" : "text/html"});
response.write('Request served by: ' + process.pid);
console.log(process.pid);
response.end();
}

http.createServer(onRequest).listen(8888);
console.log("Server has started.");
 
 
The sample output of this app:

 
Now I am going to install pm2 and run my test.js application using pm2.
 

Installing PM2:

$ sudo npm install pm2 -g

 

Running our application with pm2

Now we will start our test application using pm2 and will run multiple processes to form our cluster.
$ pm2 start test.js --name "testapp" -i 0
Options:
--name : This will specify a name for our application. This name can be used in other pm2 commands.
-i : Start the application in cluster mode, and the number of processes to run. A value of 0 informs pm2 to start as many worker processes as you have CPU cores.

So in our case we have 2 core CPU, so pm2 started 2 processes for our application.
 

Monitoring our application:

We can use the following pm2 commands to monitor our application:
Get list of applications monitored by pm2:
$ pm2 list

 
To get more details about an application:
$ pm2 show testapp
This will return details of all the processes running for that application. To get more details about a process, we can use the pm2 id for that process
$ pm2 show 1
Same output we can get using the pm2 desc command.


 
Monitoring the processes with CPU and RAM usage:
$ pm2 monit

The blue bar shows CPU usage and red one shows RAM usage for a particular process.
 

Checking logs of all the monitored processes:

$ pm2 logs
pm2 logs command shows tail command kind of output from all the log files. Log files for each individual processes are generated in PM2_PROCESS_USER_HOME_DIRECTORY/.pm2/logs directory.
So in my case /home/pranabs/.pm2/logs


To clean up the log files:
$ pm2 flush

 
To check if the cluster is working fine, I open my testapp in browser which displays the PID of the worker process which served the request.

If I keep refreshing the page, I could see different PIDs. If I check the displayed PIDs, I could find these PIDs in pm2 list command. This means that the user requests are being served from different processes which indicates some sort of load balancing is working in our cluster.

 

Restarting application:

pm2 reload <APP_NAME/all>
To restart all the monitored applications:
$pm2 reload all
To restart a particular application:
$pm2 reload testapp

 

Stopping application:

We can stop particular process/application or all applications
$ pm2 stop testapp

 

 

To remove application from pm2:

We can delete particular process/application or all applications from pm2
$ pm2 delete testapp

 

 

Checking auto start of failed process:

pm2 automatically starts a failed process. To verify that we will forcefully kill one of the processes and check whether pm2 starts another process for the failed one. Here I killed the process 5910, and we could see in the below screenshot that pm2 had started another process with ID 5939.

 

 

 

Starting applications automatically at server boot time

We can run the command pm2 startup to create the init script and deploy that init script to run at system startup.
To auto detect the platform just run pm2 startup:
$ pm2 startup
Also we can specify the platform with the startup command:
$ pm2 startup [platform]
The available options for platform are ubuntu, centos, redhat, gentoo, system, darwin and amazon
As I am using Ubuntu, so I am specifying ubuntu
$ pm2 startup ubuntu
This command will give us a command to run as root, which will actually deploy the init script at system startup.
sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u pranabs

If we want to run the application as root, then we can directly run the pm2 startup command as root and it will deploy the necessary startup scripts.

Next run pm2 save command so that pm2 saves the currently monitored processes. The saved processes will be automatically started by pm2 when the system boots.
$ pm2 save

PM2 is very convenient tool for running node.js applications and the clustering is a very powerful feature. So try and enjoy pm2 .