What is forever in nodejs?
Forever basically allows you to run your nodejs application as a process.
Without forever you might type npm start
or node index.js
to start your application and it will run in your terminal session.
With forever, you can start it off and still have access to your terminal session/close it.
forever
is a node.js package that is used to keep the server alive even when the server crash/stops. When the node server is stopped because of some error, exception, etc. forever automatically restarts it
From the npmjs https://www.npmjs.com/package/forever
A simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given node script runs continuously (i.e. forever)
Forever can be used as
forever start app.js
It provides many useful functions which you can see in the link above.
Directly quoting from http://blog.nodejitsu.com/keep-a-nodejs-server-up-with-forever/
The purpose of Forever is to keep a child process (such as your node.js web server) running continuously and automatically restart it when it exits unexpectedly.