Node JS - Cannot Kill Process Executed with Child Process Exec

Question

We are trying to kill the process of a chrome browser launched with nodes child_process exec command

var process = cp.exec(`"chrome.exe" --app="..."`, () => {}); // working great

But when we try

process.kill(); //nothing happens...

Does the process refer to the chrome window or something else? if not, how can we get a hold of the newly opened chrome window process, PID, etc...?

Any help would be great...

Note - we have tried using the chrome_launcher NPM but it didn't help because we couldn't open chrome in kiosk mode without fullscreen, but this is an issue for a different question...

Answer 1

Try the PID hack

We can start child processes with {detached: true} option so those processes will not be attached to main process but they will go to a new group of processes.

Then using process.kill(-pid) method on main process we can kill all processes that are in the same group of a child process with the same pid group. In my case, I only have one processes in this group.

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

var child = spawn('your-command', {detached: true});

process.kill(-child.pid);