Beware - forever list vs sudo forever list are not the same

A few days back I noticed that my Pub/Sub Listener (a node.js script that listens for events and routes data to my Datastore) for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was behaving badly. I had recently deployed some updated Listener logic which was being bypasses altogether.

My Pub/Sub Listener were "kept alive" using the Forever npm module, as I was working on a GCP Compute Engine, I was using sudo to run all my commands.

So I launched my Pub/Sub Listener using:

sudo forever app.js

To debug the issue, I ran the following to stop all my Forever scripts:

sudo forever stopall

And verified this by doing:

sudo forever list

It shows an empty list. So what was wrong? It seemed as be as though Forever was running some hidden processes and my Pub/Sub listener was still running.

After a bit of digging around, it seemed as though, sometime in the past I had launched my Pub/Sub Listener using

forever app.js

So what was the problem?

Well my scripts were running as both root user and my user permissions, and were essentially duplicated.

As you can see:

So to fix this, just stopall on your root account.

forever stopall

And make sure you only run your Forever script using the correct user permissions.

Happy Coding!