How to run node js application programmatically using forever

For Programmatic approach , you can use Forever-Moniter

var forever = require('forever-monitor');

  var child = new (forever.Monitor)('your-filename.js', {
    max: 3,
    silent: true,
    options: []
  });

  child.on('exit', function () {
    console.log('your-filename.js has exited after 3 restarts');
  });

  child.start();

You could make use of the child_process module. Check the doc, there're some useful information there: http://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html

To give a brief example

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
exec('forever', function callback(error, stdout, stderr){
    // cb
});

If you don't need a callback / don't want to wait for the execution:

var exec = require('child_process').exec('forever').unref();

Was that helpful?

Best Marc

Edit: Ok, not sure if I really got the point of your question, but my answer combined with https://stackoverflow.com/a/23871739/823851 might offer a good solution.

Usage:

• forever start hello.js to start a process.
• forever list to see list of all processes started by forever
• forever stop hello.js to stop the process, or forever stop 0 to stop the process with index 0 (as shown by forever list).

node-config is a good module for managing different configurations of a Node.js app.

For example, to make a "production" config, /config/production.json would contain:

{
  "port" : "3000",
  "ip" : "192.168.1.1"
}

In one of your node application JS files:

config = require('config')
....
var port = config.port;
var ip = config.ip;

And to launch the app in this configuration, just first set your NODE_ENV to production from the shell before running your app.

export NODE_ENV=production
forever start app.js

Make additional config JSON files as needed for each of your environments. default.json is used when no environment is specified.