Node.js command line script sometimes does not terminate

Question

I have a node js script with an async main method. Sometimes the script terminates fine, other times it hangs.

const main = async () => {
    let updates = []
    // ... add a bunch of promises to updates
    await Promise.all(updates)
} 

main()

Does anyone know why this script sometimes might hang? It just doesn't terminate though it appears to have run to completion.

Fechter

It's impossible to be certain based on what you provide here, but generally this happens if you fail to resolve or reject all your promises and/or don't call process.exit() appropriately. – Triiodomethane

Yes this happens to me a lot--your async function inherently returns a promise even though nothing is explicitly returned. So if you add main().then(() => process.exit()) it should always terminate. – Fadeout

Answer 1

Because your function is async, you need to explicitly terminate it when it finishes:

main().then(() => process.exit())

Anisometropia