lethal

Controlled process-termination and chaos-testing utilities for Node.js services

Features

• Spawn and manage child processes for shutdown testing and fault injection.
• Send signals, staged termination sequences, and timed kills to verify graceful shutdown.
• Verify cleanup hooks, open-handle detection, and exit codes with simple assertions.
• CLI and programmatic APIs for integrating termination scenarios into CI and chaos tests.

Install

npm install lethal

Quick Start

const lethal = require('lethal');

(async () => {
  // Spawn a child process (e.g., a local server) to test graceful shutdown
  const ctl = lethal.spawn('node', ['server.js'], { cwd: __dirname });

  // Optionally wait for a startup message or timeout
  await ctl.waitForOutput(/listening on/i, { timeout: 5000 });

  // Send a SIGTERM after a short delay and verify shutdown
  await ctl.kill({ signal: 'SIGTERM', delay: 200 });
  const result = await ctl.waitForExit(5000);

  if (result.graceful) {
    console.log('Process shut down gracefully');
  } else {
    console.error('Process did not shut down cleanly', result);
    process.exitCode = 1;
  }
})();

License

MIT