Why is PM2 not launching my Node process?

Ok, I got the answer after posting an issue to the pm2 github issues page.

Sharing it here in case anyone else finds themselves in this situation:

https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues/4113

(Basically pm2 3.2.5 introduced a bug that causes this issue in Windows. My dev install was 3.2.4. The issue was resolved by reverting to 3.2.4 in production. Simple process, see instructions at link above.)

Just a note for those who are saying to run this in no-daemon mode, (pm2 start --no-daemon), you should use this mode if you're trying to diagnose the reason why when you run with the daemon, your script fails.

Almost invariably, this is because you're telling PM2 to watch a dist folder or similar while it's building, so PM2 keeps restarting until it hits its limit (because files are being regenerated at pretty rapid speed) and then outputs the "errored" status.

Running in no-daemon is absolutely not recommended in production. Ensure that PM2 is running as a daemon so it can itself restart, and so it can restart your processes as a process itself. If you kill your terminal sessions or they are automatically timed out on your host, you will quickly find your service dies when that happens.

So, in short.. do it the right way and figure out what the problem is, rather than being lazy and turning PM2 into a glorified wrapper for the node binary.