feat: include "vitest" in the process name

[sheremet-va]

Description

Please don't delete this checklist! Before submitting the PR, please make sure you do the following:

• It's really useful if your PR references an issue where it is discussed ahead of time. If the feature is substantial or introduces breaking changes without a discussion, PR might be closed.
• Ideally, include a test that fails without this PR but passes with it.
• Please, don't make changes to pnpm-lock.yaml unless you introduce a new test example.

Tests

• Run the tests with pnpm test:ci.

Documentation

• If you introduce new functionality, document it. You can run documentation with pnpm run docs command.

Changesets

• Changes in changelog are generated from PR name. Please, make sure that it explains your changes in an understandable manner. Please, prefix changeset messages with feat:, fix:, perf:, docs:, or chore:.

[stackblitz]

Run & review this pull request in StackBlitz Codeflow.

[netlify]

✅ Deploy Preview for fastidious-cascaron-4ded94 canceled.

Name	Link
🔨 Latest commit	fc6330b
🔍 Latest deploy log	https://app.netlify.com/sites/fastidious-cascaron-4ded94/deploys/651467459749ba0008b11979

[sheremet-va]

@AriPerkkio what do you think?

[sheremet-va]

bun doesn't support changing title yet, but to be future proof we can do process.title += ' (vitest)'

[silverwind]

process.title can not be longer than the original title:

https://nodejs.org/api/process.html#processtitle

on Linux and macOS, process.title is limited to the size of the binary name plus the length of the command-line arguments because setting the process.title overwrites the argv memory of the process

So I assume += will likely crash the runtime on affected platforms.

[sheremet-va]

I don't see how it will do that from the comment you linked.

[sheremet-va]

Or are you saying that process.title already fulfills these requirements before reassigning?

[sheremet-va]

From manual testing it looks like that title cannot be longer than node {filename} - in our case it's probably(?) node vitest.mjs.

When running Vitest, I wasn't able to come up with the name that would not fit in the activity monitor. If you just have a simple file, the limit is reached pretty fast:

process.title = 'node (vitest)'
setTimeout(() => {}, 5000)

node t.mjs

Activity monitor shows:

node (vite

[AriPerkkio]

Activity monitor shows:

node (vite

Would vitest (node) be better? 😄

[sheremet-va]

This problem exists only for this custom file due to the short name. Vitest doesn't have this issue

[AriPerkkio]

This works for my debugging workflow. 👍

Without the node prefix it would not show in pgrep node so having that is great. We should also add this to entrypoints of node:child_process, e.g. packages/vitest/src/runtime/child.ts

[silverwind]

Why not just process.title = 'vitest'? Many process list parsing tools can match that out of the box, but can likely not match node (vitest). Also, put a try-catch around it for unsupporting runtimes.

[sheremet-va]

Why not just process.title = 'vitest'? Many process list parsing tools can match that out of the box, but can likely not match node (vitest). Also, put a try-catch around it for unsupporting runtimes.

Because people look for the "node" process usually. This is why I asked @AriPerkkio opinion here (this change was discussed in a team meeting)

[AriPerkkio]

Why not just process.title = 'vitest'?

If your tests spawn external processes you won't see those if you look for vitest. Minimal repro below:

process.title = "vitest";
setTimeout(() => {}, 5000);

$ node repro.mjs

$ pgrep node
> no results

This works:

process.title = "node (vitest)";
setTimeout(() => {}, 5000);

$ node repro.mjs

$ pgrep node
76662       # <--- Yes this is good

$ pgrep vitest
76662          # <-- also here

$ ps $(pgrep node)
  PID   TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
76662 s008  S+     0:00.04 node (vitest) 

[silverwind]

I prefer pidof over pgrep because it's a exact match it won't find it with the current name:

$ node -e 'process.title = "node (vitest)"; setTimeout(() => {}, 60000);'

$ pidof vitest # fails

$ node -e 'process.title = "vitest"; setTimeout(() => {}, 60000);'

$ pidof vitest # works

[silverwind]

Also, what if vitest is run in another runtime like bun or deno? It's wrong to identify as node in such cases.

[sheremet-va]

Also, what if vitest is run in another runtime like bun or deno? It's wrong to identify as node in such cases.

This should not be a problem because:

1. bun doesn't support process renaming
2. Deno doesn't support running vitest

[silverwind]

bun doesn't support process renaming

It will eventually and then you'll have to needlessly change the process name again.

I still think vitest is the ideal process name but if you persist on this silly name, use at least path.basename(process.argv[0]) to make it agnostic to the runtime.