If you're running Node.js apps on a server, forever is a very useful utility. You tell it to launch an app and it keeps it running forever, hence its name.
If the software crashes, forever just relaunches it.
You can launch as many Node apps as you want, and it'll keep an eye on all of them and keep them running.
If it didn't exist you'd have to write it. Hence it exists.
I run forever on all my servers. On one of my servers it keeps 18 apps running simultaneously. It's been working well since I switched off Heroku and onto straight Linux.
Yes I know there is other software that does it better (there always is) but I use forever. I feel I need to explain this because many of the responses I get will be that I should switch to something that has a nice feature, even if it isn't the exactly what I'm asking for. Geeks love to tell you about their favorite tools, I'm like that too. But I want to make my life easier, right now, and however foolishly, I use forever. ;-)
One more disclaimer. I figure there's a good chance the feature already exists, I'm just unable to find it with the search tools I have and my own limited ingenuity.
I'd like to take a snapshot of the current mix of apps, and save it to file.
forever save snapshot.frvr
And then I'd like to be able to launch that snapshot and have it load all the apps.
forever start snapshot.frvr
This would save a lot of time after rebooting a server, esp if one of your servers has 18 apps running in forever.
And as I said in the disclaimers section above, it wouldn't surprise me if it already exists!
My email address is dave.winer@gmail,.com.