destroyable-server

Destroyable-Server

Part of HTTP Toolkit: powerful tools for building, testing & debugging HTTP(S)

A tiny Node.js module to make any server force-closeable.

Without this module, when you call server.close() it stops listening for new connections, but it doesn't close existing connections, which can stop your process from exiting or cause problems with starting new servers.

With this module, you can call server.destroy() to forcibly shut down all existing sockets in addition to closing the server, to immediately & completely (but cleanly) end all connections. Unlike server.closeIdleConnections() and similar, this is available on all net servers (not just HTTP) closes all connections with no possibility of race conditions as new connections appear, and provides a promise you can wait on to ensure all connection closure has fully completed before your code continues.

This works for HTTP, TLS, bare sockets, whatever. Anything that extends net.Server or follows its patterns should work correctly.

Use it like so:

const net = require('net');

const { makeDestroyable } = require('destroyable-server');

// Create a server somewhere:
let server = net.Server((socket) => { /* ... */ };

// Make it destroyable:
server = makeDestroyable(server);

// When you're done with it, destroy it:
server.destroy();

Calling makeDestroyable mutates the passed server slightly, to track all active connections, and add a destroy() method which ends them.

Calling destroy() ends the connections and the server, and returns a promise, which resolves once that is complete.