Process Management

Managing applications states

With PM2 you can easily start/restart/reload/stop/list applications in background.

Start

To start an application:

$ pm2 start api.js

You can also start any kind of application like bash commands, script, binaries:

$ pm2 start "npm run start"
$ pm2 start "ls -la"
$ pm2 start app.py

Start and display log stream

To start an app and check logs stream use the --attach option:

$ pm2 start api.js --attach

When quitting via Ctrl-C, the app will still run in background.

Passing arguments

All option passed after -- will be passed as argument to the app:

$ pm2 start api.js -- arg1 arg2

Configuration File

When managing multiple application at the same time or having to specify multiple options, you can use a configuration file. Example with this ecosystem.config.js file:

module.exports = {
  apps : [{
    name   : "limit worker",
    script : "./worker.js",
    args   : "limit"
  },{
    name   : "rotate worker",
    script : "./worker.js",
    args   : "rotate"
  }]
}

Then to start both apps:

$ pm2 start ecosystem.config.js

Read more about configuration file.

Restart

To restart an application:

$ pm2 restart api

To restart all applications:

$ pm2 restart all

To restart multiple apps at once:

$ pm2 restart app1 app3 app4

Updating environment variables and options

To update environment variables or PM2 options, specify the --update-env CLI option:

$ NODE_ENV=production pm2 restart web-interface --update-env

Stop

To stop a specified application:

$ pm2 stop api
$ pm2 stop [process_id]

To stop them all:

$ pm2 stop all

To stop multiple apps at once:

$ pm2 stop app1 app3 app4

Note: this will not delete the application from PM2 application list. See next section to delete an application.

Delete

To stop and delete an application:

$ pm2 delete api

To delete them all:

$ pm2 delete all

Listing Applications

To list all running applications:

$ pm2 list
# Or
$ pm2 [list|ls|l|status]

To specify which order you want the application to be listed:

$ pm2 list --sort name:desc
# Or
$ pm2 list --sort [name|id|pid|memory|cpu|status|uptime][:asc|desc]

Terminal Dashboard

PM2 gives you a simple way to monitor the resource usage of your application. You can monitor memory and CPU easily and straight from your terminal with:

pm2 monit

Showing application metadata

To display metadata about an application:

$ pm2 show api

Reset restart count

To reset the restart counter:

$ pm2 reset all