keep-alive-ping

Free hosting sites (Render, Railway, Heroku) put your site to sleep when nobody visits it. This module sends automatic requests to your site so it stays awake.

Install

npm install keep-alive-ping

Two ways to use it

1. Run it directly (no code needed)

npx keep-alive-ping <your-url> <interval-in-milliseconds>

2. Use it inside your own Node app

const keepAlive = require('keep-alive-ping');

const stop = keepAlive('https://mysite.com', 5 * 60 * 1000); // url, interval in ms
// ...your own code here...

// When you want to stop, call stop()
process.on('SIGINT', () => { stop(); process.exit(0); });

stop() is optional. Without it the pings keep going, which is what you want for a server that should always stay awake.

If you cloned this repo

npm install
node index.js <your-url> <interval-in-milliseconds>

How to use

Open a terminal and run:

npx keep-alive-ping <your-url> <interval-in-milliseconds>

Example 1 — ping my site every 5 minutes:

npx keep-alive-ping https://mysite.com 300000

Example 2 — ping my site every 1 minute:

npx keep-alive-ping https://mysite.com 60000

Example 3 — no interval given, it uses 5 minutes:

npx keep-alive-ping https://mysite.com

Time in milliseconds:

| You want | Type this | | --- | --- | | every 10 seconds | 10000 | | every 1 minute | 60000 | | every 5 minutes | 300000 | | every 30 minutes | 1800000 |

What you will see

2026-10-03T16:39:36.240Z 200 https://mysite.com
2026-10-03T16:44:36.301Z 200 https://mysite.com

Every line means one request was sent. 200 means your site replied correctly.

If you see FAIL, the request did not go through. The reason is printed next to it (for example, no internet, or your site took too long to reply).

To stop it

Press Ctrl + C in the terminal.

Testing it on your computer

The test-server folder has a dummy website that logs every request it receives. Use it to check that your module is working.

Terminal 1 — start the dummy site:

node test-server/server.js

You will see it log every request:

Test server on http://localhost:4000
2026-10-03T16:48:39.894Z request received: GET /

Terminal 2 — start the module:

node index.js http://localhost:4000 5000

(If you installed it from npm, type npx keep-alive-ping http://localhost:4000 5000 instead.)

If terminal 1 keeps printing new lines, the module works.

Good to know

• It sends a simple GET request (the same thing a browser does when it opens a page).
• If your site needs a login or password, this will not work as it is.
• If a request takes longer than 10 seconds, it gives up and tries again on the next interval.