I started a mongodb server instance with the following command line parameters
mongod --port 12345 --fork --logpath mongodb/test/logs/log.txt --dbpath mongodb/test/wiredTiger
How can I temporarily make this database instance write its stdout/stderr messages to my console window?
Or is it possible to connect to it via a mongo client and instruct the server to echo those messages to this client?
If your server runs on a *nix environment you can use tail command from a terminal like so:
tail -f /${path}/mongodb/test/logs/log.txt
It will just give you a scrolling view of your log.txt file in the console screen.
Sorry i'm not a user of mongod, so i'm guessing here:
Mongod seems to be c++ program using cout, cerr streams, eg see initializer.cpp:95 (that is line 95 of that file, you may need scroll down a bit)
Q: Does the mongod command redirect everything (stdout,stderr) to the logfile given in logpath? If so, maybe just remove the 'logpath' option. (haven't tested it.)
To test where the output goes, maybe try to run it with some invalid startup parameters, and see where the output goes.
Start it without --fork and --log so that it will run in foreground and write logs to console:
mongod --port 12345 --dbpath mongodb/test/wiredTiger
This will start db on port 12345
EDIT this is fixed. See my answer below.
I have a headless server running transmission-daemon on Angstrom Linux. I am able to SSH into the machine and invoke transmission-daemon via this init script; however, the process terminates as soon as I log out.
The command issued in the script is:
start-stop-daemon --chuid transmission --start --pidfile /var/run/transmission-daemon.pid --make-pidfile --exec /usr/local/bin/transmission-daemon --background -- -f
After starting the daemon via # /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon start, I can verify using ps that the process is owned by the user transmission (which is not the user I am logging in as via SSH).
I've tried every variation of the above command that I am aware of, including:
With and without the --background option for start-stop-daemon
Appending > /dev/null 2>&1 & to the start-stop-daemon command (source -- although there seems to be mixed results in that thread as to whether this is the right approach)
Appending > /dev/null 2>&1 & </dev/null & (source)
Adding & to the end of the command
Using nohup
None of these seems to work -- the result is always the same: the process exits immediately after I close the SSH session.
What can/should I do to keep the daemon running after I disconnect the SSH session?
Have you tried using GNU Screen?
It allows you to keep your session open even if you disconnect (but not if you exit).
It's a simple case of:
apt-get install screen
or
yum install screen
Since I cannot leave comments yet :), here is a good site that explains some functions of Screen, http://www.tecmint.com/screen-command-examples-to-manage-linux-terminals/
I use screens all the time, to do exactly what you are talking about. You open a screen, in the terminal, do what you need to do, then you can log off and your process will still be running.
sudo loginctl enable-linger your_user
# This allows users who are not logged in to run long-running
# service after ssh session ends
This is now resolved. Here's the background: at some point prior to running into this problem, something happened to my $PATH (I don't recall what) and the location where transmission-daemon lived (/sbin) was removed. Under the mistaken impression that transmission-daemon was no longer present on the system, I installed again from an ipk. This is the state the system was in when I initially asked this question.
I don't know why it made a difference, but once I corrected my $PATH and started running transmission-daemon installed at /sbin, everything worked again. The daemon keeps running after I log out.
mongod runs fine as my own system user, but when I attempt to start it from a boot script using sudo, it fails.
I'm not running it as root, i'm doing:
sudo -u normaluser /user/local/bin/mongod --fork --logpath=/var/log/mongodb.log --logappend >/dev/null 2>&1 &
The log file is writeable by normaluser and I have no problem running it as normaluser directly.
How can I start this on boot?
Ok, given our conversation in the comments above I think you should look at the following file:
Red Hat based init script
It seems like you might want to follow that and write something like:
daemon --user normaluser mongod --fork --logpath=/var/log/mongodb.log --logappend >/dev/null 2>&1 &
My server deployment script triggers a long-running process through SSH, like so:
ssh host 'install.sh'
Since my internet connection at home is not the best, I can sometimes be disconnected while the install.sh is running. (This is easily simulated by closing the terminal window.) I would really like for the install.sh script to keep running in those cases, so that I don't end up with interrupted apt-get processes and similar nuisances.
The reason why install.sh gets killed seems to be that stdout and stderr are closed when the SSH session is yanked, so writing to them fails. (It's not an issue of SIGHUP, by the way -- using nohup makes no difference.) If I put touch ~/1 && echo this fails && touch ~/2 into install.sh, only ~/1 is created.
So running ssh host 'install.sh &> install.out' solves the problem, but then I lose any "live" progress and error output.
So my question is: What's an easy/idiomatic way to run a process through SSH so that it doesn't crash if SSH dies, but so that I can still see the output as it runs?
Solutions I have tried:
When I run things manually, I use screen for cases like this, but I don't think it will be of much help here because I need to run install.sh automatically from a shell script. Screen seems to be made for interactive use (it complains "Must be connected to a terminal.").
Using install.sh 2>&1 | tee install.out didn't help either (silly of me to think it might).
You can redirect stdout/stderr into install.out and then tail -f it. The following snippet actually works:
touch install.out && # so tail does not bark (race condition)
(install.sh < /dev/null &> install.out &
tail --pid "$!" -F install.out)
But surely there must a less awkward way to do the same thing?
Try using screen:
screen ./install.sh
If your ssh session gets interrupted, you can simply reattach to the session via another ssh connection:
screen -x
You can provide a terminal to your ssh session using the -t switch:
ssh -t server screen ./install.sh
install.sh 2>&1 | tee install.out
if the only issue is not getting stderr. You didn't say exactly why the tee wasn't acceptable. You may need the other nohup/stdin tweaks.
I connect to the linux server via putty SSH. I tried to run it as a background process like this:
$ node server.js &
However, after 2.5 hrs the terminal becomes inactive and the process dies. Is there anyway I can keep the process alive even with the terminal disconnected?
Edit 1
Actually, I tried nohup, but as soon as I close the Putty SSH terminal or unplug my internet, the server process stops right away.
Is there anything I have to do in Putty?
Edit 2 (on Feb, 2012)
There is a node.js module, forever. It will run node.js server as daemon service.
nohup node server.js > /dev/null 2>&1 &
nohup means: Do not terminate this process even when the stty is cut
off.
> /dev/null means: stdout goes to /dev/null (which is a dummy
device that does not record any output).
2>&1 means: stderr also goes to the stdout (which is already redirected to /dev/null). You may replace &1 with a file path to keep a log of errors, e.g.: 2>/tmp/myLog
& at the end means: run this command as a background task.
Simple solution (if you are not interested in coming back to the process, just want it to keep running):
nohup node server.js &
There's also the jobs command to see an indexed list of those backgrounded processes. And you can kill a backgrounded process by running kill %1 or kill %2 with the number being the index of the process.
Powerful solution (allows you to reconnect to the process if it is interactive):
screen
You can then detach by pressing Ctrl+a+d and then attach back by running screen -r
Also consider the newer alternative to screen, tmux.
You really should try to use screen. It is a bit more complicated than just doing nohup long_running &, but understanding screen once you never come back again.
Start your screen session at first:
user#host:~$ screen
Run anything you want:
wget http://mirror.yandex.ru/centos/4.6/isos/i386/CentOS-4.6-i386-binDVD.iso
Press ctrl+A and then d. Done. Your session keeps going on in background.
You can list all sessions by screen -ls, and attach to some by screen -r 20673.pts-0.srv command, where 0673.pts-0.srv is an entry list.
This is an old question, but is high ranked on Google. I almost can't believe on the highest voted answers, because running a node.js process inside a screen session, with the & or even with the nohup flag -- all of them -- are just workarounds.
Specially the screen/tmux solution, which should really be considered an amateur solution. Screen and Tmux are not meant to keep processes running, but for multiplexing terminal sessions. It's fine, when you are running a script on your server and want to disconnect. But for a node.js server your don't want your process to be attached to a terminal session. This is too fragile. To keep things running you need to daemonize the process!
There are plenty of good tools to do that.
PM2: http://pm2.keymetrics.io/
# basic usage
$ npm install pm2 -g
$ pm2 start server.js
# you can even define how many processes you want in cluster mode:
$ pm2 start server.js -i 4
# you can start various processes, with complex startup settings
# using an ecosystem.json file (with env variables, custom args, etc):
$ pm2 start ecosystem.json
One big advantage I see in favor of PM2 is that it can generate the system startup script to make the process persist between restarts:
$ pm2 startup [platform]
Where platform can be ubuntu|centos|redhat|gentoo|systemd|darwin|amazon.
forever.js: https://github.com/foreverjs/forever
# basic usage
$ npm install forever -g
$ forever start app.js
# you can run from a json configuration as well, for
# more complex environments or multi-apps
$ forever start development.json
Init scripts:
I'm not go into detail about how to write a init script, because I'm not an expert in this subject and it'd be too long for this answer, but basically they are simple shell scripts, triggered by OS events. You can read more about this here
Docker:
Just run your server in a Docker container with -d option and, voilá, you have a daemonized node.js server!
Here is a sample Dockerfile (from node.js official guide):
FROM node:argon
# Create app directory
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
# Install app dependencies
COPY package.json /usr/src/app/
RUN npm install
# Bundle app source
COPY . /usr/src/app
EXPOSE 8080
CMD [ "npm", "start" ]
Then build your image and run your container:
$ docker build -t <your username>/node-web-app .
$ docker run -p 49160:8080 -d <your username>/node-web-app
Always use the proper tool for the job. It'll save you a lot of headaches and over hours!
another solution disown the job
$ nohup node server.js &
[1] 1711
$ disown -h %1
nohup will allow the program to continue even after the terminal dies. I have actually had situations where nohup prevents the SSH session from terminating correctly, so you should redirect input as well:
$ nohup node server.js </dev/null &
Depending on how nohup is configured, you may also need to redirect standard output and standard error to files.
Nohup and screen offer great light solutions to running Node.js in the background. Node.js process manager (PM2) is a handy tool for deployment. Install it with npm globally on your system:
npm install pm2 -g
to run a Node.js app as a daemon:
pm2 start app.js
You can optionally link it to Keymetrics.io a monitoring SAAS made by Unitech.
$ disown node server.js &
It will remove command from active task list and send the command to background
I have this function in my shell rc file, based on #Yoichi's answer:
nohup-template () {
[[ "$1" = "" ]] && echo "Example usage:\nnohup-template urxvtd" && return 0
nohup "$1" > /dev/null 2>&1 &
}
You can use it this way:
nohup-template "command you would execute here"
Have you read about the nohup command?
To run command as a system service on debian with sysv init:
Copy skeleton script and adapt it for your needs, probably all you have to do is to set some variables. Your script will inherit fine defaults from /lib/init/init-d-script, if something does not fits your needs - override it in your script. If something goes wrong you can see details in source /lib/init/init-d-script. Mandatory vars are DAEMON and NAME. Script will use start-stop-daemon to run your command, in START_ARGS you can define additional parameters of start-stop-daemon to use.
cp /etc/init.d/skeleton /etc/init.d/myservice
chmod +x /etc/init.d/myservice
nano /etc/init.d/myservice
/etc/init.d/myservice start
/etc/init.d/myservice stop
That is how I run some python stuff for my wikimedia wiki:
...
DESC="mediawiki articles converter"
DAEMON='/home/mss/pp/bin/nslave'
DAEMON_ARGS='--cachedir /home/mss/cache/'
NAME='nslave'
PIDFILE='/var/run/nslave.pid'
START_ARGS='--background --make-pidfile --remove-pidfile --chuid mss --chdir /home/mss/pp/bin'
export PATH="/home/mss/pp/bin:$PATH"
do_stop_cmd() {
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 \
$STOP_ARGS \
${PIDFILE:+--pidfile ${PIDFILE}} --name $NAME
RETVAL="$?"
[ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
rm -f $PIDFILE
return $RETVAL
}
Besides setting vars I had to override do_stop_cmd because of python substitutes the executable, so service did not stop properly.
Apart from cool solutions above I'd mention also about supervisord and monit tools which allow to start process, monitor its presence and start it if it died. With 'monit' you can also run some active checks like check if process responds for http request
For Ubuntu i use this:
(exec PROG_SH &> /dev/null &)
regards
Try this for a simple solution
cmd & exit