exit

What is exit?

The 'exit' npm package is a simple utility that allows you to gracefully exit your Node.js process. It is particularly useful in situations where you need to ensure that all pending asynchronous operations complete before the process exits, such as closing database connections or cleaning up resources.

What are exit's main functionalities?

Graceful Exit

This feature allows the process to exit gracefully after completing all pending asynchronous operations. The code sample demonstrates how to use the exit package to delay the process exit until after a timeout, ensuring that any operations within the timeout are completed.

const exit = require('exit');

// Perform some asynchronous operations
setTimeout(() => {
  console.log('Exiting...');
  exit(0); // Exit with status code 0
}, 1000);

Other packages similar to exit

graceful-fs

While primarily focused on providing replacements for the fs module to make it behave more gracefully, this package also handles process exiting more smoothly under certain file system conditions. It does not directly compare with 'exit' in terms of functionality but offers a broader scope of graceful operations.

README

exit

A replacement for process.exit that ensures stdio are fully drained before exiting.

To make a long story short, if process.exit is called on Windows, script output is often truncated when pipe-redirecting stdout or stderr. This module attempts to work around this issue by waiting until those streams have been completely drained before actually calling process.exit.

See Node.js issue #3584 for further reference.

Tested in OS X 10.8, Windows 7 on Node.js 0.8.25 and 0.10.18.

Based on some code by @vladikoff.

Getting Started

Install the module with: npm install exit

var exit = require('exit');

// These lines should appear in the output, EVEN ON WINDOWS.
console.log("omg");
console.error("yay");

// process.exit(5);
exit(5);

// These lines shouldn't appear in the output.
console.log("wtf");
console.error("bro");

Don't believe me? Try it for yourself.

In Windows, clone the repo and cd to the test\fixtures directory. The only difference between log.js and log-broken.js is that the former uses exit while the latter calls process.exit directly.

This test was done using cmd.exe, but you can see the same results using | grep "std" in either PowerShell or git-bash.

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>node log.js 0 10 stdout stderr 2>&1 | find "std"
stdout 0
stderr 0
stdout 1
stderr 1
stdout 2
stderr 2
stdout 3
stderr 3
stdout 4
stderr 4
stdout 5
stderr 5
stdout 6
stderr 6
stdout 7
stderr 7
stdout 8
stderr 8
stdout 9
stderr 9

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>node log-broken.js 0 10 stdout stderr 2>&1 | find "std"

C:\node-exit\test\fixtures>

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

2013-11-26 - v0.1.2 - Fixed a bug with hanging processes.
2013-09-26 - v0.1.1 - Fixed some bugs. It seems to actually work now!
2013-09-20 - v0.1.0 - Initial release.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 "Cowboy" Ben Alman
Licensed under the MIT license.