nohup node service using cron job on CentOS 7

Question

I want to run nohup node service using a cron job on CentOS 7. For this I created a file /home/guest/start_indexjs mentioned below:

#!/bin/bash

if pgrep -f "index.js" >/dev/null; then
echo "index.js is Running."
else
echo "index.js is Stopped."
nohup node /root/demo/index.js > /root/index-nohup.log &
fi

I login with ssh root and run following command:

cd /home/guest/
chown root start_indexjs
chgrp -R root start_indexjs
chmod +x start_indexjs

I want to run /home/guest/start_indexjs every minute. For this I added the following line into /etc/crontab:

*/1 * * * * root /home/guest/start_indexjs > /var/log/start_indexjs.log

I created /var/log/start_indexjs.log with the following permissions:

-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root    179 Aug 12 12:31 start_indexjs

Then I restarted crond service using below command

systemctl restart crond.service

After all this, my cron job running but when /home/guest/start_indexjs > /var/log/start_indexjs.log run, in cron job, my index.js didn't run. There is no process running with index.js using following command:

ps -ef | grep index.js

Answer 1

• In order to run script from crond you have to provide full path to all binaries, which are pgrep and node in your current case
• nohup is not necessary. crond runs scripts without allocating terminal.