Azure app service breaks with node process managers but works with node

1
votes

I have a weird problem I've been scratching my head over. I have an express app which uses pm2 in production mode

cross-env NODE_ENV=production pm2 start ./src/index.js

This works perfectly fine locally. However when I deploy this to Azure App service, the container keeps crashing. I can see the pm2 process starting successfully in the logs but the app then crashes with the following error message

Container didn't respond to pings on port 8080

I have tried setting WEBSITES_PORT to 8080 and I've tried using process.env.PORT and hard coding the port to 8080 but nothing has worked.

Does anyone know what might be the cause? I prefer not having to run the application against node in production.

Update I just tried this with supervisor and had the same result. Looks like there is something about process managers that's a problem here, maybe?

1
node.jsazureazure-web-app-servicepm2

1 Answers

1
votes

Whenever you start your node server, you should specify the port as given from the environment.

Basic example:

const LOCAL_APP_PORT = 9300;

server.create({ port: process.env.port || LOCAL_APP_PORT })

Note: In order to debug if is pm2 related or not, try for instance to start it simply with node command.

Update

Based on your last comment. I think the issue might be that pm2 daemonizes itself by default. Could you try to pass the --no-daemon flag to pm2 command?