pm2 start node cause static file inaccessible

[morfies]

If I start my express project with pm2, my static files in 'public' directory will become inaccessible.
After some time, I figured out that I had multiple projects with the same 'app.js' file as startup js.

So if I use pm2 to start all these app.js, all the app name should be 'app', though with different ids,
I suspect pm2 can't distinguish these projects with same names, because after I changed the app.js to different names, everything went ok

[daveruiz]

If you do pm2 delete app.js to remove the process from pm2 list, and then pm2 start app.js will solve it too without file renaming. I guess there is some cache persistent between stop and restart/start actions and it messed up somehow.

[schmich]

I hit this as well, but at least for me, the issue was specifying an incorrect relative path for Express' static files.

In my server, I was serving static files with:

app.use(express.static('public'));

At first, this looks correct. However, this actually directs Express to serve static files out of the public folder that is _relative to the working directory_.

I was running pm2 start /srv/www/project/server.js from a startup script through Docker, so the working directory was /. The static files were being served out of /public instead of the expected /srv/www/project/public.

Deleting and restarting worked for me, too, but that was because I cd'd to /srv/www/project before running pm2 start server.js. With a working directory of /srv/www/project, everything worked.

In the end, the fix is simple. Use __dirname to ensure the static files are served relative to the script, not the current working directory:

app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));

Express' documentation explains this as well.

[stephen-last]

@schmich Thank you for posting your update, even after the issue was closed, I had the exact same problem and your solution works great!