pm2

Nice move and nice write-up! There has been so much propaganda around serverless, so we need to hear more of these voices. I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. You seem to have figured out a good solution, but I wanted something simpler like PM2 for automatic process management/restarting/logs. Unfortunately PM2 has an issue [1] that makes it unworkable with FreeBSD. It would be so nice if FreeBSD had a smooth, more declarative way of managing processes. 1. https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues/5718

I used this to run an entire startup for 4 years (complex data needs, not CRUD). It was a stopgap that was good enough to stay. I always wanted rid of it, but there were always more pressing problems. Used the load balance feature extensively, which worked but starts to falter when you get to big scale. It's not a stable foundation, it's a thing that's been hacked around enough to the point where the problems are mostly gone. If I did it all over again, I'd pick something proper like systemd or k8s. I would say this is more a surprisingly capable dev tool than a real service manager. Take a look at the code. E.g. https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/blob/master/lib/API.js I don't want this thing running my production environment if I can help it.

Have you tried using a process manager like supervisord[1] or pm2[2]? The former has a pretty clean declarative interface that you could view as a replacement for something like a docker-compose file or a k8s pod config. You don't get any containerization/isolation benefits obviously, but it sounds like you've already accepted that. [1] http://supervisord.org/ [2] https://github.com/Unitech/pm2

I'm surprised they haven't included a process manager for the production build. In my experience it allows for much easier 0-sec downtime updates and load balancing. We're using pm2 [1] for this if anyone's interested. [1] https://github.com/Unitech/pm2

Promises and now async/await go a long way to remedy the discrepancy between synchronous exceptions and asynchronous errors, by helping ensure that they both end up as promise rejections (as long as promises/async functions are your de facto async abstraction) while also being handleable with try/catch. The Koa framework (and in the future Express I believe) is designed around this concept, so middleware-level promise rejections can be handled in a single place, and by default simply produce an HTTP error response. It is a shame that it's going to take a while for the Node stdlib to catch up, however. Also I thought something like PM2 (https://github.com/Unitech/pm2) or Forever (https://github.com/foreverjs/forever) was pretty much standard for production Node apps?

Wish they'd do a full write-up. I'd be interested in how they run their node processes. - Using containers, VMs, bare metal? - Using a process manager like Forever[1], PM2[2] or just native systemd? [1] https://github.com/foreverjs/forever [2] https://github.com/Unitech/pm2

Author of this hack speaking - I've built this interface 3 years ago to track downloads of PM2 (https://github.com/Unitech/pm2), a process manager for Node.js I've authored. I'm really proud to see this dashboard here on HN! In term of UI, the map is inspired from the impressive Tron Movie interface (Gmunk artwork http://gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room) The dashboard is very hypnotic and it asked a lot of meticulous tuning to give this effect. Hope you like it!

The idea of systemd isn't bad. What's annoying is the friction involved in using it. It's just a shade too ornate, a little too magical, in both cases only by a small degree, but it's an important one. Creating a workable systemd init script is actually pleasant. Getting it running is easy. Checking for errors with status is nice, but searching the logs is annoying. pm2 (https://github.com/Unitech/pm2) has a neat feature where you can watch logs easily, someting that systemd should totally steal and pack into journalctl, like "systemctl logs sshd" shows it in real-time, an alias to the obnoxiously verbose "journalctl -u sshd -f"

I've seen this crop up a few times recently and a vocal minority seems to panic every time. I ran into it the other day installing pm2 w/ npm which downloads an optional package that they use for analytics https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/blob/master/package.json#L184 Is the problem that they are using google's service? Is it the tracking that people don't like? Is it the messaging/copy to the users? I'm sure there's plenty of people on hacker news that build analytics software for a living. I've worked on email click and open tracking. Doesn't seem terrible if it helps them build their product.

That's quite a funny project. I setup this thing and just draw a code viz for https://github.com/Unitech/PM2, that looks pretty cool: http://i.imgur.com/gvm0fxs.png

Tbh, I thought this was about https://github.com/Unitech/pm2 . I was pretty confused.

A nice little dash. Surprisingly, I found the most valuable part of it is honestly just splitting stdout/stderr, as the rest of the data is relatively easy to access (except event loop lag, but there are packages like toobusy[https://www.npmjs.com/package/toobusy-js] to help with this). It doesn't work in combination with nodemon or babel-watch (yet), but the code looks very clean & simple so I assume it'll be an easy update. If you're looking for more granular reporting & monitoring I can heartily recommend pm2's web dashes [https://github.com/Unitech/pm2]. There are also terminal dashes around like pm2-gui [https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2-gui]. Nice (and clean) work @formidable.

How about clustering the Node server? By default, node uses only one process. Making the server use all available processes requires a bit more work (see https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cluster.html or https://github.com/Unitech/pm2) but will probably do more justice to Node.js vs Python.