How to run a go app continously on an Ubuntu server - linux

Couldn't seem to find a direct answer around here.
I'm not sure if I should run ./myBinary as a Cron process or if I should run "go run myapp.go"
What's an effective way to make sure that it is always running?
Sorry I'm used to Apache and Nginx.
Also what are best practices for deploying a Go app? I want everything (preferably) all served on the same server. Just like how my development environment is like.
I read something else that used S3, but, I really don't want to use S3.

Use the capabilities your init process provides. You're likely running system with either Systemd or Upstart. They've both got really easy descriptions of services and can ensure your app runs with the right privileges, is restarted when anything goes down, and that the output is are handled correctly.
For quick Upstart description look here, your service description is likely to be just:
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]
setuid the_username_your_app_runs_as
exec /path/to/your/app --options
For quick Systemd description look here, your service is likely to be just:
[Unit]
Description=Your service
[Service]
User=the_username_your_app_runs_as
ExecStart=/path/to/your/app --options
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

You can put it in an inifiny loop, such as:
#! /bin/sh
while true; do
go run myapp.go
sleep 2 # Just in case
done
Hence, once the app dies due some reason, it will be run again.
You can put it in a script and run it in background using:
$ nohup ./my-script.sh >/dev/null 2>&1 &

You may want to go for virtual terminal utility like screen here. Example:
screen -S myapp # create screen with name myapp
cd ... # to your app directory
go run myapp.go # or go install and then ./myappfrom go bin dir
Ctrl-a+d # to go out of screen
If you want to return to the screen:
screen -r myapp
EDIT: this solution will persist the process when you go out of terminal, but won't restart it when it'll crash.

Related

Create a startup script for meteor in linux server

I have followed some posts and tutorials as well to create a script to start meteor project when server restart. i have followed answer mentioned in : How to run meteor on startup on Ubuntu server
Then I gave executable permission to script with "chmod +x meteor-server.sh".
I have tried to put this script in /etc/init.d and /etc/init folders but meteor project does not start at the reboot. I'm using ubuntu 16.04.
I would be grateful if you can show me the fault that i have done. Following code is my "meteor.server.sh" script file.
# meteorjs - meteorjs job file
description "MeteorJS"
author "Jc"
# When to start the service
start on runlevel [2345]
# When to stop the service
stop on runlevel [016]
# Automatically restart process if crashed
respawn
# Essentially lets upstart know the process will detach itself to the background
expect fork
# Run before process
pre-start script
cd /home/me/projects/cricket
echo ""
end script
# Start the process
exec meteor run -p 4000 --help -- production
First of all, there's already a very good tool mupx that allows you to deploy meteor projects to your own architecture, so there's really no need to do it by yourself unless you have a very good.
If you really need to deploy manually, this will take several steps. I am not going to cover all the details because you're specifically asking about the startup script and the remaining instruction should be easily accessible in the Internet.
1. Prepare your server
Install MongoDB unless you are planning to use a remote database.
Install NodeJS.
Install reverse proxy server, e.g. Nginx, or haproxy.
Install Meteor, which we will use as the build tool only.
2. Build your app
I am assuming here that you already have the source code of your app put on the server to which you're planning to deploy. Go to your project root and run the following command:
meteor build /path/to/your/build --directory
Please note that if /path/to/your/build exists it will be recursively deleted first, so be careful with that.
3. Install app dependencies
Go to /path/to/your/build/bundle/programs/server and run:
npm install
4. Prepare a run.sh script
The file can be of the following form:
export MONGO_URL="mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/appName"
export ROOT_URL="http://myapp.example.com"
export PORT=3000
export METEOR_SETTINGS="{}"
/usr/bin/env node /path/to/your/build/bundle/main.js
I will assume you put it in /path/to/your/run.sh. A couple of notes here:
This form of MONGO_URL assumes you have MongoDB installed locally.
You will need to instruct your reverse proxy server to point your app trafic to port 3000.
METEOR_SETTINGS should be the output of JSON.stringify(settings) of whatever settings object you may have.
5. Prepare upstart script
With all the preparations we've made so far, the script can be as simple as
description "node.js server"
start on (net-device-up and local-filesystems and runlevel [2345])
stop on runlevel [016]
respawn
script
exec /path/to/your/run.sh
end script
This file should go to /etc/init/appName.conf.
Finally i got it to work. I have used following 2 scripts to run meteor on the startup.
First i put this service file(meteor.service) in /etc/systemd/system
[Unit]
Description = My Meteor Application
[Service]
ExecStart=/etc/init.d/meteor.sh
Restart=always
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=meteor
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I have called a scipt using this service. I put this following script(meteor.sh) in /etc/init.d
#!/bin/sh -
description "Meteor Projects"
author "Janitha"
#start service on following run levels
start on runlevel [2345]
#stop service on following run levels
stop on runlevel [016]
#restart service if crashed
respawn
#set user/group to run as
setuid janitha
setgid janitha
chdir /home/janitha/projects/cricket_app
#export HOME (for meteor), change dir to plex requests dir, and run meteor
script
export HOME=/home/janitha
exec meteor
end script
I make both these file executable by using
chmod +x meteor.service
chmod +x meteor.sh
And i have used following two commands to enable the service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable meteor.service
I used this configurations successfully
In /etc/init.d add a file called meteor.sh
#!/bin/sh
export HOME="/home/user"
cd /home/user/meteor/sparql-fedquest
meteor --allow-superuser
You must give executions permissions to meteor.sh
sudo chmod 644 meteor.sh
Also you must create meteor.service in /etc/systemd/system
[Unit]
Description =Portal of bibliographic resources of University of Cuenca
Author = Freddy Sumba
[Service]
ExecStart=/etc/init.d/meteor.sh
Restart=always
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=meteor
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Also you must give permissions to meteor.service
$ sudo chmod 644 meteor.service
Then, we need add the service to this start each time that the server reboot
$ systemctl enable meteor.service
And finally start the service
$ service meteor start

How to start the upstart process for golang application?

I am using upstart to start my golang application. I have my application folder structure like this,
web-app/
/app
main.go
I built the application as below,
$cd /home/ec2-user/go/src/github.com/dineshappavoo/web-app/app/
$go build ./...
It generated the binary app
And placed the web-app.conf in /etc/init/ folder. Here is the web-app.conf content,
#Web app upstart script
description "start and stop web app"
start on (net-device-up
and local-filesystems
and runlevel [2345])
stop on runlevel [016]
respawn
respawn limit 5 30
console output
script
chdir /home/ec2-user/go/src/github.com/dineshappavoo/web-app/app
exec ./app
end script
When I tried sudo initctl list, it lists the process as stop/waiting. And I tried to start the process
$sudo initctl start web-app
It shows the process as start/running. But it is not started.
I checked the /var/log/messages logs. It shows,
init: web-app main process (18740) terminated with status 127
I couldn't start the process. I think there is some issue with the chdir. I tried different options for past two days. And I am fairly new to upstart but no luck. Could someone help me with this?
OP eventually solved after fixing a few issues. See comments, notably:
upstart might not recognise environment variables
Amazon Linux Image currently uses an old version of init (upstart 0.6.5), lacking newer features such as console log & nested script tags
status 127 can occur if exec can't find the binary
status 1 can occur if binary runs but fails
substituting a simple program in an upstart script can help diagnose errors

Run Upstart with Forever

We have a series of node.js scripts on an Ubuntu (13.10) server that we want to keep up and running as much as possible, and restart automatically in the event of a server reboot. We've tried a few different techniques, but have yet to find a solution that works.
Setup: None of the scripts run on port 80, instead we run them on ports above 8000.
Node.js files are currently running in /usr/lib/sites/path/Node
We have set them up and running individually using Forever while running in the context of a well privileged (but not root) user, simply by running the following from the context of the folder containing the scripts:
forever start server_process.js
We want to run these scripts at server start up, and have some ability later (if needed) to restart them.
Upstart sounds like it should be the solution, but we've not yet managed to get it working. The following script starts, then stops without indicating why...
description "Our app"
version "1.0"
author "Nautilytics"
start on startup
stop on shutdown
expect fork
env FOREVER_PATH=/usr/bin/forever
env APPLICATION_DIRECTORY=/usr/lib/sites/path/Node
env APPLICATION_START=ourapp.js
env LOG_PATH=/var/log/ourapp.log
chdir /usr/lib/sites/path/Node
script
exec $FOREVER_PATH start --sourceDir $APPLICATION_DIRECTORY -f -v $APPLICATION_START >> $LOG_PATH 2&>1
end script
Through blunt trial and error, a couple of times we have been able to get errors that indicate that other files (required by ourapp.js) could not be found, as if the chdir has not worked or passed through into the forever start.
After scouring the internet for a solution, we decided to stick with nodejs and not use forever for this task. It was much easier and with respawn it does just about everything we needed forever to do for us.
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
respawn
script
exec sudo nodejs /usr/lib/sites/path/Node/ourapp.js 2>&1 >> /var/log/ourapp.log
end script
A bit more secure upstart config script might be (hardened-nodejs.conf):
description "Managing and monitoring nodejs application"
# start when filesystem is mounted networking is up
start on (filesystem and net-device-up IFACE!=lo)
# stop on shutting down the system
stop on runlevel [016]
# application environment
# staging and development instances should use hardened-nodejs.override to define environment
env NODE_ENV=production
# respawn the job up to 10 times within a 5 second period.
# If the job exceeds these values, it will be stopped and marked as failed.
respawn
respawn limit 10 5
# ssl-cert group can read certificates
setuid www-data
setgid ssl-cert
exec /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/lib/sites/path/Node/ourapp.js 2>&1 >> /var/log/ourapp.log
One of solutions to run nodejs application listening on a low port might be to use capabilities tools.
If serving over SSL user or group must have read access to the certificate. Check ssl-cert package and this answer for basic concepts.
Have you checked process.cwd()? It could be that your process is running elsewhere.

How do I get my Golang web server to run in the background?

I have recently completed the Wiki web development tutorial (http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/). I had tons of fun and I would like to experiment more with the net/http package.
However, I noticed that when I run the wiki from a console, the wiki takes over the console. If I close the console terminal or stop the process with CTRL+Z then the server stops.
How can I get the server to run in the background? I think the term for that is running in a daemon.
I'm running this on Ubuntu 12.04. Thanks for any help.
Simple / Usable things first
If you want a start script without much effort (i.e. dealing with the process, just having it managed by the system), you could create a systemd service. See Greg's answer for a detailled description on how to do that.
Afterwards you can start the service with
systemctl start myserver
Previously I would have recommended trying xinetd or something similar for finer granuarlity regarding resource and permission management but systemd already covers that.
Using the shell
You could start your process like this:
nohup ./myexecutable &
The & tells the shell to start the command in the background, keeping it in the job list.
On some shells, the job is killed if the parent shell exits using the HANGUP signal.
To prevent this, you can launch your command using the nohup command, which discards the HANGUP signal.
However, this does not work, if the called process reconnects the HANGUP signal.
To be really sure, you need to remove the process from the shell's joblist.
For two well known shells this can be achieved as follows:
bash:
./myexecutable &
disown <pid>
zsh:
./myexecutable &!
Killing your background job
Normally, the shell prints the PID of the process, which then can be killed using the kill command, to stop the server. If your shell does not print the PID, you can get it using
echo $!
directly after execution. This prints the PID of the forked process.
You could use Supervisord to manage your process.
Ubuntu? Use upstart.
Create a file in /etc/init for your job, named your-service-name.conf
start on net-device-up
exec /path/to/file --option
You can use start your-service-name, as well as: stop, restart, status
This will configure your service using systemd, not a comprehensive tutorial but rather a quick jump-start of how this can be set up.
Content of your app.service file
[Unit]
Description=deploy-webhook service
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/go webhook.go
WorkingDirectory=/etc/deploy-webhook
User=app-svc
Group=app-svc
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
KillSignal=SIGINT
SyslogIdentifier=deploy-webhook-service
PrivateTmp=true
Environment=APP_PARAM_1=ParamA
Environment=APP_PARAM_2=ParamB
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Starting the Service
sudo systemctl start deploy-webhook.service
Service Status
sudo systemctl status deploy-webhook.service
Logs
journalctl -u deploy-webhook -e
After you press ctrl+z (putting the current task to sleep) you can run the command bg in the terminal (stands for background) to let the latest task continue running in the background.
When you need to, run fg to get back to the task.
To get the same result, you can add to your command & at the end to start it in the background.
To add to Greg's answer:
To run the Go App as a service you need to create a new service unit file.
However, the App needs to know where Go is installed. The easiest way to lookup that location is by running this command:
which go
which gives you an output like this:
/usr/local/go/bin/go
With this piece of information, you can create the systemd service file. Create a file named providus-app.service in the /etc/systemd/system/ using the command below:
sudo touch /etc/systemd/system/providus-app.service
Next open the newly created file:
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/providus-app.service
Paste the following configuration into your service file:
[Unit]
Description=Providus App Service
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=forking
User=deploy
Group=deploy
ExecStart=/usr/local/go/bin/go run main.go
WorkingDirectory=/home/deploy/providus-app
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
KillSignal=SIGINT
SyslogIdentifier=providus-app-service
PrivateTmp=true
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
When you are finished, save and close the file.
Next, reload the systemd daemon so that it knows about our service file:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
Start the Providus App service by typing:
sudo systemctl restart providus-app
Double-check that it started without errors by typing:
sudo systemctl status providus-app
And then enable the Providus App service file so that Providus App automatically starts at boot, that is, it can start on its own whenever the server restarts:
sudo systemctl enable providus-app
This creates a multi-user.target symlink in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/providus-app.service for the /etc/systemd/system/providus-app.service file that you created.
To check logs:
sudo journalctl -u providus-app

How do I run a Node.js application as its own process?

What is the best way to deploy Node.js?
I have a Dreamhost VPS (that's what they call a VM), and I have been able to install Node.js and set up a proxy. This works great as long as I keep the SSH connection that I started node with open.
2016 answer: nearly every Linux distribution comes with systemd, which means forever, monit, PM2, etc. are no longer necessary - your OS already handles these tasks.
Make a myapp.service file (replacing 'myapp' with your app's name, obviously):
[Unit]
Description=My app
[Service]
ExecStart=/var/www/myapp/app.js
Restart=always
User=nobody
# Note Debian/Ubuntu uses 'nogroup', RHEL/Fedora uses 'nobody'
Group=nogroup
Environment=PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
Environment=NODE_ENV=production
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/myapp
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Note if you're new to Unix: /var/www/myapp/app.js should have #!/usr/bin/env node on the very first line and have the executable mode turned on chmod +x myapp.js.
Copy your service file into the /etc/systemd/system folder.
Tell systemd about the new service with systemctl daemon-reload.
Start it with systemctl start myapp.
Enable it to run on boot with systemctl enable myapp.
See logs with journalctl -u myapp
This is taken from How we deploy node apps on Linux, 2018 edition, which also includes commands to generate an AWS/DigitalOcean/Azure CloudConfig to build Linux/node servers (including the .service file).
Use Forever. It runs Node.js programs in separate processes and restarts them if any dies.
Usage:
forever start example.js to start a process.
forever list to see list of all processes started by forever
forever stop example.js to stop the process, or forever stop 0 to stop the process with index 0 (as shown by forever list).
I've written about my deployment method here: Deploying node.js apps
In short:
Use git post-receive hook
Jake for the build tool
Upstart as a service wrapper for node
Monit to monitor and restart applications it they go down
nginx to route requests to different applications on the same server
pm2 does the tricks.
Features are: Monitoring, hot code reload, built-in load balancer, automatic startup script, and resurrect/dump processes.
You can use monit, forever, upstart or systemd to start your server.
You can use Varnish or HAProxy instead of Nginx (Nginx is known not to work with websockets).
As a quick and dirty solution you can use nohup node your_app.js & to prevent your app terminating with your server, but forever, monit and other proposed solutions are better.
I made an Upstart script currently used for my apps:
description "YOUR APP NAME"
author "Capy - http://ecapy.com"
env LOG_FILE=/var/log/node/miapp.log
env APP_DIR=/var/node/miapp
env APP=app.js
env PID_NAME=miapp.pid
env USER=www-data
env GROUP=www-data
env POST_START_MESSAGE_TO_LOG="miapp HAS BEEN STARTED."
env NODE_BIN=/usr/local/bin/node
env PID_PATH=/var/opt/node/run
env SERVER_ENV="production"
######################################################
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [016]
respawn
respawn limit 99 5
pre-start script
mkdir -p $PID_PATH
mkdir -p /var/log/node
end script
script
export NODE_ENV=$SERVER_ENV
exec start-stop-daemon --start --chuid $USER:$GROUP --make-pidfile --pidfile $PID_PATH/$PID_NAME --chdir $APP_DIR --exec $NODE_BIN -- $APP >> $LOG_FILE 2>&1
end script
post-start script
echo $POST_START_MESSAGE_TO_LOG >> $LOG_FILE
end script
Customize all before #########, create a file in /etc/init/your-service.conf and paste it there.
Then you can:
start your-service
stop your-service
restart your-service
status your-service
I've written a pretty comprehensive guide to deploying Node.js, with example files:
Tutorial: How to Deploy Node.js Applications, With Examples
It covers things like http-proxy, SSL and Socket.IO.
Here's a longer article on solving this problem with systemd: http://savanne.be/articles/deploying-node-js-with-systemd/
Some things to keep in mind:
Who will start your process monitoring? Forever is a great tool, but it needs a monitoring tool to keep itself running. That's a bit silly, why not just use your init system?
Can you adequately monitor your processes?
Are you running multiple backends? If so, do you have provisions in place to prevent any of them from bringing down the others in terms of resource usage?
Will the service be needed all the time? If not, consider socket activation (see the article).
All of these things are easily done with systemd.
If you have root access you would better set up a daemon so that it runs safe and sound in the background. You can read how to do just that for Debian and Ubuntu in blog post Run Node.js as a Service on Ubuntu.
Forever will do the trick.
#Kevin: You should be able to kill processes fine. I would double check the documentation a bit. If you can reproduce the error it would be great to post it as an issue on GitHub.
Try this: http://www.technology-ebay.de/the-teams/mobile-de/blog/deploying-node-applications-with-capistrano-github-nginx-and-upstart.html
A great and detailed guide for deploying Node.js apps with Capistrano, Upstart and Nginx
As Box9 said, Forever is a good choice for production code. But it is also possible to keep a process going even if the SSH connection is closed from the client.
While not necessarily a good idea for production, this is very handy when in the middle of long debug sessions, or to follow the console output of lengthy processes, or whenever is useful to disconnect your SSH connection, but keep the terminal alive in the server to reconnect later (like starting the Node.js application at home and reconnecting to the console later at work to check how things are going).
Assuming that your server is a *nix box, you can use the screen command from the shell to do keep the process running even if the client SSH is closed. You can download/install screen from the web if not already installed (look for a package for your distribution if Linux, or use MacPorts if OS X).
It works as following:
When you first open the SSH connection, type 'screen' - this will start your screen session.
Start working as normal (i.e. start your Node.js application)
When you are done, close your terminal. Your server process(es) will continue running.
To reconnect to your console, ssh back to the server, login, and enter 'screen -r' to reconnect. Your old console context will pop back ready for you to resume using it.
To exit screen, while connected to the server, type 'exit' on the console prompt - that will drop you onto the regular shell.
You can have multiple screen sessions running concurrently like this if you need, and you can connect to any of it from any client. Read the documentation online for all the options.
Forever is a good option for keeping apps running (and it's npm installable as a module which is nice).
But for more serious 'deployment' -- things like remote management of deploying, restarting, running commands etc -- I would use capistrano with the node extension.
https://github.com/loopj/capistrano-node-deploy
https://paastor.com is a relatively new service that does the deploy for you, to a VPS or other server. There is a CLI to push code. Paastor has a free tier, at least it did at the time of posting this.
In your case you may use the upstart daemon. For a complete deployment solution, I may suggest capistrano. Two useful guides are How to setup Node.js env and How to deploy via capistrano + upstart.
Try node-deploy-server. It is a complex toolset for deploying an application onto your private servers. It is written in Node.js and uses npm for installation.

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