Graceful Shutdown

Overview

A skill for implementing graceful shutdown in servers, workers, and long-running processes. Ensures in-flight requests complete, background jobs finish or checkpoint, database connections close cleanly, and the process exits with a proper status code. Essential for zero-downtime deployments in container orchestrators (Kubernetes, ECS, Docker Compose) and bare-metal process managers (systemd, PM2).

When to Use This Skill

• Use when building an HTTP server that must not drop active connections during deploys
• Use when writing a background worker that processes jobs from a queue
• Use when deploying to Kubernetes, Docker, or any environment that sends SIGTERM before killing
• Use when the user says "graceful shutdown", "drain connections", "handle SIGTERM", "zero downtime", or "don't kill active requests"
• Use when implementing health check endpoints (/healthz, /readyz) for orchestrators

How It Works

Step 1: Register signal handlers early

Trap SIGTERM (orchestrator shutdown) and SIGINT (Ctrl+C) at process startup. Set a flag so the application knows it is shutting down.