ipc-utils

makes using child_process using fork easy

Info

Read the changelogs here

I highly recommend moving to v2.1.9 and above. previous versions have performance issues. I have changed how it works under the hood but it should not break how you use it.

A note on usage

for using setupComlink, you have to bind this to the method, so it knows where to look for functions and properties when the proxy is accessed. if you don't, it will lookup global by default (or whatever this refers to in that context I guess, so don't do guess work and always bind). after calling setupComlink it will return a proxy which you can use it to access your child process properties and methods. currently you should call both functions and properties as methods for it to work.

for releasing the proxy, you can use the removeComlink method provided by the package, it accepts the proxy returned by setupComlink.

you can access nested objects using dot notion (it uses lodash/get to resolve). checkout example1 in the source to see the usage.

new: as of v2.1.0 you can ALSO use nested functions and props normally (uses proxy under the hood). check out the second test of setup.test.js file if you want to know what I'm talking about. (intellisense is more enjoyable now)

also as a bonus you can typehint your proxies using jsdocs to set your proxy types to corresponding classes for intellisense support. just note that all methods are async through the proxy. this is also available in example2 in the source.

usage

npm i ipc-utils
# or
yarn add ipc-utils

then

// child.js
const { setupComlink } = require('ipc-utils');
class SomeClass {
  constructor() {
    this.parent = setupComlink.call(this);
  }

  childMethod() {
    console.log('tada');
  }
}
new SomeClass();

// parent.js
const { fork } = require('child_process');
const { setupComlink, removeComlink } = require('ipc-utils');

const forkedProcess = fork(
  path.join(__dirname, 'child.js'), [], { stdio: 'inherit', execArgv: [] },
);

const proxy = setupComlink.call(this, forkedProcess);

async function runChildMethod(){
  await proxy.childMethod();
  removeComlink(proxy);
}
runChildMethod();
// console logs 'tada' since the stdio is inherited in this example

Check out example

you can clone repo and run example1 and example2 to check it working:

npm run example1
npm run example2
# or
yarn example1
yarn example2

and run tests:

npm run test
# or
yarn test