Node spawn process check for timout

Question

I've spawned process which sometimes take to long to run, my question is there is a way to limit this process time ? for example kill this process after 3 min ?

Answer 1

You can use process.kill in a timeout. But remember to cancel the timeout if the child finishes before it gets fired.

Take a look at this example:

This is child.sh that returns after 3 seconds:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 3
echo DATA FROM CHILD

This is a Node program that spawns that child:

var seconds = process.argv[2] || 2;
var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
var child = spawn('bash', ['child.sh'], {detached: true});
var stopped;
var timeout = setTimeout(() => {
  console.log('Timeout');
  try {
    process.kill(-child.pid, 'SIGKILL');
  } catch (e) {
    console.log('Cannot kill process');
  }
}, seconds*1000);
child.on('error', err => console.log('Error:', err));
child.on('exit', () => { console.log('Stopped'); clearTimeout(timeout); });
child.stdout.on('data', data => console.log(data.toString()));

By default it waits for 2 seconds, which is shorter than the child needs and the child will get killed, but you can add a different number of seconds as a command line argument:

node nodeprogram.js 10

to wait for 10 seconds which is enough for the child to finish.