How do I shutdown a Node.js http(s) server immediately?

The trick is that you need to subscribe to the server's connection event which gives you the socket of the new connection. You need to remember this socket and later on, directly after having called server.close(), destroy that socket using socket.destroy().

Additionally, you need to listen to the socket's close event to remove it from the array if it leaves naturally because its keep-alive timeout does run out.

I have written a small sample application you can use to demonstrate this behavior:

// Create a new server on port 4000
var http = require('http');
var server = http.createServer(function (req, res) { res.end('Hello world!'); }).listen(4000);

// Maintain a hash of all connected sockets
var sockets = {}, nextSocketId = 0;
server.on('connection', function (socket) {
  // Add a newly connected socket
  var socketId = nextSocketId++;
  sockets[socketId] = socket;
  console.log('socket', socketId, 'opened');

  // Remove the socket when it closes
  socket.on('close', function () {
    console.log('socket', socketId, 'closed');
    delete sockets[socketId];
  });

  // Extend socket lifetime for demo purposes
  socket.setTimeout(4000);
});

// Count down from 10 seconds
(function countDown (counter) {
  console.log(counter);
  if (counter > 0)
    return setTimeout(countDown, 1000, counter - 1);

  // Close the server
  server.close(function () { console.log('Server closed!'); });
  // Destroy all open sockets
  for (var socketId in sockets) {
    console.log('socket', socketId, 'destroyed');
    sockets[socketId].destroy();
  }
})(10);

Basically, what it does is to start a new HTTP server, count from 10 to 0, and close the server after 10 seconds. If no connection has been established, the server shuts down immediately.

If a connection has been established and it is still open, it is destroyed. If it had already died naturally, only a message is printed out at that point in time.

The https://github.com/isaacs/server-destroy library provides an easy way to destroy() a server with the behavior desired in the question (by tracking opened connections and destroying each of them on server destroy, as described in other answers).

My best guess would be to kill the connections manually (i.e. to forcibly close it's sockets).

Ideally, this should be done by digging into the server's internals and closing it's sockets by hand. Alternatively, one could run a shell-command that does the same (provided the server has proper privileges &c.)

I have a same issue, and searched around for a solution. Many answers there but seems there is no concise way to do this unfortunately.

So the answer is we need a native implementation like

server.destroy();

or

server.terminate();

Seriously.

As others have said, the solution is to keep track of all open sockets and close them manually. My node package killable can do this for you. An example (using express, but you can call use killable on any http.server instance):

var killable = require('killable');

var app = require('express')();
var server;

app.route('/', function (req, res, next) {
  res.send('Server is going down NOW!');

  server.kill(function () {
    //the server is down when this is called. That won't take long.
  });
});

var server = app.listen(8080);
killable(server);

If you need to keep the process alive after closing the server, then Golo Roden's solution is probably the best.

But if you're closing the server as part of a graceful shutdown of the process, you just need this:

var server = require('http').createServer(myFancyServerLogic);

server.on('connection', function (socket) {socket.unref();});
server.listen(80);

function myFancyServerLogic(req, res) {
    req.connection.ref();

    res.end('Hello World!', function () {
        req.connection.unref();
    });
}

Basically, the sockets that your server uses will only keep the process alive while they're actually serving a request. While they're just sitting there idly (because of a Keep-Alive connection), a call to server.close() will close the process, as long as there's nothing else keeping the process alive. If you need to do other things after the server closes, as part of your graceful shutdown, you can hook into process.on('beforeExit', callback) to finish your graceful shutdown procedures.

You can use process.kill()

if(req.url == '/quit') {
    console.log('quit');
    console.log(process.pid);     
    process.kill(process.pid);
    return;
}