"Hot patches" for node.js code

[Federico Kereki]

Hi! What's the current (better?) way of hot patching some JS code in use at a node.js server? With Apache, I can just change a PHP file, and from then on, it will be used, but with node.js, it doesn't work that way. I've read about several possible methods, but no one seemed to be as simple as Apache's. What would you recommend?

[Mike Cantelon]

Federico Kereki wrote:Hi! What's the current (better?) way of hot patching some JS code in use at a node.js server? With Apache, I can just change a PHP file, and from then on, it will be used, but with node.js, it doesn't work that way. I've read about several possible methods, but no one seemed to be as simple as Apache's. What would you recommend?

Hi Federico,

With Node it's a bit tricker than with PHP/Apache. The way it's mostly done is having a file watcher running in the background that checks for flle changes and, when a file has been found to have been changed, restarts the server. There are a number of watcher utilities out there... "forever" (https://www.npmjs.org/package/forever), created by the folks at Nodejitsu, is one that's been around for awhile and will also restart your server if it crashes.

Cheers,
Mike

[Federico Kereki]

Thanks for the answer! But, what happens to live, running, connections? I mean, if "forever" restarts the server, and some requests were being processed (by the changed JS code, or by other unrelated, unchanged code) at the time, what happens with them when node.js is restarted?