Automate installing pm2 as a service on Windows, Linux, or Darwin

This project aims to automate installation of pm2 as a service, particularly on Windows. It is largely based on this excellent gist.

There are a couple issues that make automated deployment of pm2 service installations difficult on Windows:

• Unlike on Linux, pm2 has no built-in startup script support for Windows
• The npm directory must be accessible to the Local Service user
• The pm2_home folder must be writeable by the Local Service user
• The PM2_HOME environmental variable must be set on a machine level

When running on Windows, pm2-installer will do the following:

• Configure npm to keep it's global files in C:\ProgramData\npm, instead of keeping them in the current user's %APPDATA%
• Install pm2 globally (using an offline cache if one is available)
• Create a folder at C:\ProgramData\pm2 and set the PM2_HOME environmental variable to it at the machine level
• Set permissions both the new npm and pm2 folders so that the Local Service user may access them
• Leverage a fork of pm2-windows-service to create a pm2 Windows service that will persist across reboots
• Install the pm2-logrotate module so that log files don't fill up the disk

After that, pm2 will be installed as a service. To add your app, run pm2 start app.js from an admin command line interface. Make sure to run pm2 save afterwards as well, and it'll be persisted across reboots and user logouts.

Copy the entire pm2-installer directory onto the target machine, then run:

npm run setup

On Windows, the setup script assumes you have already configured npm to use prefix and cache directories in a location accessible to the LocalService user. To do this automatically, run configure first:

npm run configure
npm run setup

That's it.

pm2-installer is also designed to function without an internet connection. It does this by installing pm2 on an internet-connected build machine to create a cache, then installing from cache when run on the deployment machine.

On an internet-connected build machine of the same OS as the deployment target, run the following:

npm run bundle

This will install pm2 globally, and save the resources required to do so into the project's directory. Transfer the entire pm2-installer directory onto the deployment target, then run:

npm run setup

pm2-installer will automatically detect the resources required to install without an internet connection and use them. Otherwise, it will download them from the npm registry.

To remove the pm2 service, run:

npm run remove

This will remove the service and completely uninstall pm2.

If you used the configure script to configure npm, you can revert those settings by running:

npm run deconfigure

MIT © Jesse Youngblood