pork

pork is an improved fork for node. Unlike fork, pork doesn't unnecessarily keep your process alive. With fork, you have to call process.disconnect() or process.exit(). With pork, your process will automatically exit when there are no more active listeners for message on a process.

pork is useful when you want to run services in the background that shutdown when your code has finished running.

Installation

$ npm install pork

Example

The following is an example of a program that porks a process, and sends and receives five pings/pongs. The process automatically exits after the fifth pong is received.

main.coffee

{pork} = require 'pork'
server = pork "#{__dirname}/pong.js"

pings = 0
ping  = ->
  return if ++pings > 5
  setTimeout
    server.send 'ping'
    server.once 'message', (msg) ->
      console.log msg
      ping()
  , 1000

pong.coffee

require 'pork'

process.on 'message', (msg) ->
  process.send 'pong'

Limitations

pork currently uses stdin and stdout for IPC. In the future it will be changed to use an auxiliary handle like fork.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 Gerald Monaco. See the LICENSE.md file for license rights and limitations (MIT).