Using pm2 Process Manager

PM2 is a great package for running node processes on a server. It supports saving its process list and running at system startup.

Get started with npm i -g pm2 or pnpm i -g pm2

Commands

start

Normally, you would run a process using the following syntax:

$ pm2 start npm -- start 

where the -- delineates the arguments to send to the process you are starting. This would be for if your regular start script was npm start. 

For other scripts using the run command, you would do

$ pm2 start npm -- run develop 

status

You can then check your processes using pm2 status

--name

You can also set a process name using the --name flag

basedir Error Workaround

Apparently there is an incompatibility between pm2 and pnpm where the following error occurs. If trying to run 

$ pm2 start pnpm -- develop

you would get the following error:

basedir=$(dirname "$(echo "$0" | sed -e 's,\\,/,g')") 
^^^^^^^ SyntaxError: missing ) after argument list 
at ...

To get around this, I found that I could just call a script that would run the required commands for me. I like to keep these in a folder to save a bunch of cd-ing. 

$ pm2 start ~/launchers/my-job.sh

which contained this simple script

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/code/strapi-demo
pnpm develop

This solved the issue for me. Apparently this may depend on how you installed pnpm (via brew, asdf, npm, scoop, native install script). I had installed via native script.