How to make a node application on Digitalocean run constantly? - node.js

Question

I recently got a node application up and running on digitalocean's droplet. Everything is working properly, if I go forever on the server javascript file I can navigate to the site and it works.
If I close the terminal window in which I am ssh-ing, the site is no longer available, which is expected of course. But my question is, how can I run the forever as a daemon of sorts?
I could not find the answer anywhere, which is really strange...hope somebody here might be able to help me

Answer 1

Generally forever should continue running if you set it up as a background task and don't close it. Unfortunately if the server needs to restart (which can happen often), you need something to get it started again.
An alternative to forever is pm2, pretty much the same thing. There is a tutorial on how to set up your production server here. Here is an excerpt from the site for just the pm2 part, as I assume you got everything else sorted:
Install PM2
Now we will install PM2, which is a process manager for Node.js applications. PM2 provides an easy way to manage and daemonize applications (run them as a service).
We will use Node Packaged Modules (NPM), which is basically a package manager for Node modules that installs with Node.js, to install PM2 on our app server. Use this command to install PM2:
sudo npm install pm2 -g
Manage Application with PM2
PM2 is simple and easy to use. We will cover a few basic uses of PM2.
Start Application
The first thing you will want to do is use the pm2 start command to run your application, hello.js, in the background:
pm2 start hello.js
This also adds your application to PM2's process list, which is outputted every time you start an application
PM2 automatically assigns an App name (based on the filename, without the .js extension) and a PM2 id. PM2 also maintains other information, such as the PID of the process, its current status, and memory usage.
Applications that are running under PM2 will be restarted automatically if the application crashes or is killed, but an additional step needs to be taken to get the application to launch on system startup (boot or reboot). Luckily, PM2 provides an easy way to do this, the startup subcommand.
The startup subcommand generates and configures a startup script to launch PM2 and its managed processes on server boots. You must also specify the platform you are running on, which is ubuntu, in our case:
pm2 startup ubuntu
The last line of the resulting output will include a command (that must be run with superuser privileges) that you must run:
Output:
[PM2] You have to run this command as root
[PM2] Execute the following command :
[PM2] sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u sammy
Run the command that was generated (similar to the highlighted output above) to set PM2 up to start on boot (use the command from your own output):
sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u sammy