killable

What is killable?

The killable npm package provides a simple way to make server-like objects (such as those created by `http.createServer`) 'killable'. This means you can easily terminate all active connections with a single method call, allowing for graceful shutdowns of servers. This is particularly useful in scenarios where you need to cleanly stop a server during development, testing, or in production environments for updates or maintenance.

What are killable's main functionalities?

Making a server killable

This feature allows you to wrap an existing server object, making it 'killable'. After calling `killable(server)`, you can call `server.kill()` to terminate all active connections and stop the server.

const killable = require('killable');
const http = require('http');

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.end('Hello World!');
});

killable(server);

server.listen(3000, () => console.log('Server running on port 3000'));

// Later, to kill the server and all active connections:
server.kill();

Other packages similar to killable

stoppable

Similar to killable, stoppable also enhances server objects to allow for graceful shutdowns by terminating active connections. However, stoppable provides more fine-grained control over the shutdown process, including the ability to set a timeout for how long to wait for active connections to close before forcibly shutting down.

http-terminator

http-terminator is designed to gracefully terminate HTTP servers by closing existing connections and refusing new ones. It offers a slightly different API compared to killable, focusing on providing a comprehensive solution for shutting down HTTP and HTTPS servers, including support for websockets.

README

killable

Keeps track of a server's open sockets so they can be destroyed at a moment's notice. This way, the server connection can be killed very fast.

Installation

npm install killable

Example usage

Using express: ('server' in the example is just an http.server, so other frameworks or pure Node should work just as well.)

var killable = require('killable');

var app = require('express')();
var server;

app.route('/', function (req, res, next) {
  res.send('Server is going down NOW!');

  server.kill(function () {
    //the server is down when this is called. That won't take long.
  });
});

var server = app.listen(8080);
killable(server);

API

The killable module is callable. When you call it on a Node http.Server object, it will add a server.kill() method on it. It returns the server object.

server.kill([callback]) closes all open sockets and calls server.close(), to which the callback is passed on.

Inspired by: http://stackoverflow.com/a/14636625

License

ISC