Introduction

NodeJS Tidy Exit - api hooks to detect shutdown and perform cleanup actions for a graceful tidy application exit.

Goal

Successfully finish processing in-progress requests before shutting down instead of abruptly abandoning them.

Approach

• Listen to process shutdown events
• When an event occurs
• stop accepting new requests
• close existing connections
• wait to finish processing exisitng requests
• exit process after a timeout or when all requests are done

Library Integration

• ExpressJS
• NodeJS Net Server

Usage

var tidy_exit = require('tidy-exit');

tidy_exit.addTidyExitHandler(function(err, done) {
    console.log('Shutting down');
    done();
});

var app = express();
var handle = tidy_exit.hookExpressApp(app);

var server = http.createServer(app);
var handle = tidy_exit.hookHttpServer(server);

# if intentionally closing app before process shutdown (test cases, etc.)
handle.close();

Inspiration & References

https://github.com/mathrawka/express-graceful-exit

http://glynnbird.tumblr.com/post/54739664725/graceful-server-shutdown-with-node-js-and-express

http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for-production-part-3-zero-downtime-deployments-with-nginx/