How to run process in background?

10 January 2017

I will show you a very quick and easy way to properly run your process in the background. You should not use this workflow in production, but for development and quick tests, this is perfectly suitable for you.

Now that we have that notice out of the way, let’s do this!

• run screen
• enjoy the alternate dimension. Here, will be able to run your process without using nohup and &
• run your process, for example: node server.js
• now, detach from screen with ctrl+a, d. You will not cause a SIGINT to the process and you’ll go back to the “real world”.
• note that your process is still running inside a screen session
• list sessions you are detached from with screen -ls
• reattach to one with screen -r [sessionid]

There you go! You can also use tmux if you want, which is similar but have more features and better user experience. The proper way to do this in production however is to use something like pm2 or supervisord or creating a startup script.

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