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electronforever-monitor

Using foreverjs in electron causes electron app duplicates in dock

I am using foreverjs within my electron app main like so:

const forever = require("forever-monitor");
let child = forever.start(scriptPath, {fork: true});

I am doing this intentionally over using child_process.fork because I want foreverjs to monitor the forks and restart them when needed.

Well - the above works, but looking at my dock on mac osx, I see that the electron app is duplicated for each fork. In production it is the same -- the app icon get's duplicated N times in the Dock for each process.

Investigating further I found the cause but not the solution. The cause is that when you fork a process normally using child_process from within electron, it launches it using the Electron Helper app.

However when you fork a process using forever.js it uses the Electron app itself, thus explaining the duplicates.

How do I force forever to use the Electron Helper app when forking and not the Electron app itself?

Solution

  • OK, so I figured it out. Quite simply you need to pass one environment variable to foreverjs like so:

    const forever = require("forever-monitor");
let child = forever.start(scriptPath, {fork: true, env: {ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE: 1}});

    Doing this and the fork will correctly use its prepackaged version of node instead of launching another copy of electron "main".