Shawl

Shawl is a wrapper utility that provides a more convenient way to run various applications as Windows services. According to the developer, the app can come in handy for projects that need to run as service, especially since you can bundle the tool with the project, set it as an entry point and pass the command to run via Command Line. The tool takes care of the required Windows API so that the program you are working on solely responds to ctrl-C/SIGINT.

Compared to other similar tools out there, the app works in a different manner and does not need you to run a special install command for preparing the service. In other words, you no longer need to run a CustomAction to install a service as an MSI. Thanks to the tool, you can configure the service as needed, which can be with running sc create or the standard ServiceInstall in an MSI, for example.

It is important to note that you need to set the path correctly to make most of the tool. Since the default account for new services can be found in the Local System account and you want to run a command like npm start, then make sure to add the corresponding Path. This is important because it is different from the environment variable which has the path in your user account.