How to REALLY kill child_process nodejs

I am using mocha with Nodejs to test my restApi. When I run mocha I tell my test to build child_process

and run the API so I can make requests to it.

The problem is that when the test exits (exiting or failing), the API seems to keep running in the background. I saw several answers here that instruct to manually kill the child process whenever the main process exits. So I did it like this:

export function startProcess(done) {
    const child = spawn('babel-node', ["app.js"]);

    child.stdout.on("data", function(data) {
        data = data.toString();
        // console.log(data.toString());

        if(data.indexOf("Server online") > -1) done();
    });

    child.stderr.on('data', function(err) {
        console.log("ERROR: ", err.toString());
    });

    child.on('exit', function(code) {
        console.log("PROPERLY EXITING");
        console.log("Child process exited with code", code);
    });

    process.on('exit', function(code) {
        console.log("Killing child process");
        child.kill();
        console.log("Main process exited with code", code);
    });
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

When the main process finishes, it writes the "Killing child process" log, which means it was child.kill()

actually called. But if I try to run my test again when the spawn command is called, the API throws an error

Error: listening on EADDRINUSE: 3300

which means the API is still running and this port address is accepted.

So I need to start sudo pkill node

to actually kill the whole node process and then npm test

work again.

Am I missing something? Is this really the way to achieve what I expect?

I was thinking about using child_process.exec

to run sudo pkill node

in my listener process.on('exit')

, but that doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.

This happens on both Mac and Ubuntu.

Any suggestions? Thanks to