Node.js server resets on user error - node.js

I’m developing a Node.js application which in a user signs up in three levels.
the problem is when a user encounters and error in any of the levels, the whole server reset and the rest of the user sessions get close.
the reason that server restarts is that I’m using forever start app to start my app,otherwise it goes down completely.
how to stop the server to stops completely when just one users
encounters any error?
how to start each users in an individual thread(by thread i mean an isolate environment)?

Considering #Michael 's answer
unfortunately that's not how Node works. An unhandled error can cause
the server to restart.
The only way is to handle execptions in a proper way. So you can check this answers comments about how to handle an uncaughtException
var handleRequest = function(req, res) {
res.writeHead(200);
res1.end('Hello, World!\n');
};
var server = require('http').createServer(handleRequest);
process.on('uncaughtException', function(ex) {
// do something with exception
});
server.listen(8080);
console.log('Server started on port 8080');

Related

How to create a nodejs app that keeps listening to ports and does not exist

I need a skeleton of NodeJS app that listens to a port and does not exit.
Normally when you execute a JS file, it exits after finishing executing. I think a while(true) {} is the wrong way to go.
Can you provide some code sample for non-exiting JS code? It is a little bit like NodeJS web server, but I don't know how to do this.
Use the built-in http library:
var http = require('http');
//create a server object:
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.write('Hello World!'); //write a response to the client
res.end(); //end the response
}).listen(8080); //the server object listens on port 8080
After establishing a listener, unless an exception is thrown, execution will continue as the event loop waits for a message to be received.
You get much the same behavior if you were to do something with setInterval(). Since NodeJS knows there is an interval or pending action, it will continue execution until stopped or an exception is thrown.

Express specific socket.io connections per page

So currently my setup is I have a standard app.get('/', etc for my index and inside here, I have my io.on('connection', function etc). Now the goal is so that every time someone connects to only the homepage i can get that socket with io.on(connection and send things to it that way, and my syntax and all is fine however i believe having my io.on('connection' inside a route is my issue.
The problem: Whenever someone connects to my website after i start the server, it works great, for debug examples i have a console.log inside of it and its called once and we are good. However if that same person reloads the page my io.on('connection' is called again, and this time iw ill get 2 console.log's... when I again reload I then get 3 and so on and so on, no matter if i close the page and reopen it or come from a different ip. It seems as if the connection isnt closed when I reload and all the still hanging connections are recalled when I reload.
I know this is a little unorthodox with me not posting my code. Its not the syntax, here is an example of essentially the set up described. Oh and also i need access to the req input from the app.get which is why its in there in the first place, I have passport variables saved in it.
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
res.sendFile(__dirname + '/index.html');
io.on('connection', function(socket){
console.log("1 connection");
});
});
I hope this explains my issue well enough. When i looked for answers first i found a bunch of stuff about routing, but was confused. Any help is appreciated!
For what I got from the question and the comments.
You are doing it wrong way. You should never put the ONs and EMITs of socket connection where they are called multiple times as they are appended every time.
for example : first time this is called
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
res.sendFile(__dirname + '/index.html');
io.on('connection', function(socket){
console.log("1 connection");
});
});
the io.ons['connection'] has the value
function(socket){
console.log("1 connection");
}
second time you call it the callback is appended again. and the value of io.ons['connection'] is now
function(socket){
console.log("1 connection");
}
function(socket){
console.log("1 connection");
}
So it prints console.log two times
SECOND :
if you want to do the further work after the user is logged in.then you need to verify the user here, you can use a socket.emit('init',..... from client side
and server-side socket.on('init',...... will verify the user and can access else return and close the connection.
Never, ever put event handlers like io.on() inside app.get() handlers. That is just wrong and will not do even close to what you want. It will not have an event handler in place until someone hits your page and then every time someone hits that page, it will add a duplicate event handler. Both of these are wrong.
The structure should look like this:
// watch for people hitting the / route in the browser
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
res.sendFile(__dirname + '/index.html');
});
// listen for incoming webSocket connections
io.on('connection', function(socket){
console.log("new connection");
});
This will prevent the duplicate event handlers you were getting.
In case what you were trying to do is to listen for incoming socket.io connections only from a specific page, that is not a support capability. Socket.io connections are from a browser, not from a specific route. You can get access to the cookies associated with the hosting page and the code in the web page making the browser can connect to something like a specific namespace, but there is no built in correlation between an incoming socket.io connection and a specific route the way there is with http requests.
If you're trying to get access to a session object from an incoming socket.io connection, that can usually be done via the cookies associated with the start of the socket.io connection.

Node.js server.close() won't close due to active connection

I'm trying to show some information before the application is closed. So, I create an event that will be fired when the server receive a SIGINT. This code will work if no connection is ever made. However, if there had been a connection localhost:4040, the server will never close as the server think there is still an active connection(connection count will be 1). The part I don't understand is why Node.js still think there is an active connection when the request has already finish. Is there any ways to kill a connection or my current way of closing the request is wrong?
Here is the code of What I'm trying to accomplish:
var http = require('http')
var server = http.createServer(function(req, res){
res.end('test');
}).listen(4040);
process.on( 'SIGINT', function(){
server.getConnections(function(err, count){
console.log('connection:' + count);
})
server.close(function(){
process.exit();
});
})
Some ideas I have:
saving a copy of the sockets I receive and close them individually
Hope someone can give me some advice in solving this.Thanks
store all sockets from you have and close them manually
use process.exit() and destroy the entire process instead
use domains and do a scary deprecated domain.dispose()

Efficient HTTP shutdown with keepalives?

This Node.js server will shutdown cleanly on a Ctrl+C when all connections are closed.
var http = require('http');
var app = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.end('Hello');
});
process.on('SIGINT', function() {
console.log('Closing...');
app.close(function () {
console.log('Closed.');
process.exit();
});
});
app.listen(3000);
The problem with this is that it includes keepalive connections. If you open a tab to this app in Chrome and then try to Ctrl+C it, it won't shutdown for about 2 minutes when Chrome finally releases the connection.
Is there a clean way of detecting when there are no more HTTP requests, even if some connections are still open?
By default there's no socket timeout, that means that connections will be open forever until the client closes them. If you want to set a timeout use this function: socket.setTimeout.
If you try to close the server you simply can't because there are active connections, so if you try to gracefully shutdown the shutdown function will hang up. The only way is to set a timeout and when it expires kill the app.
If you have workers it's not as simple as killing the app with process.exit(), so I made a module that does extacly what you're asking: grace.
You can hack some request tracking with the finish event on response:
var reqCount = 0;
var app = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
reqCount++;
res.on('finish', function() { reqCount--; });
res.end('Hello');
});
Allowing you to check whether reqCount is zero when you come to close the server.
The correct thing to do, though, is probably to not care about the old server and just start a new one. Usually the restart is to get new code, so you can start a fresh process without waiting for the old one to end, optionally using the child_process module to have a toplevel script managing the whole thing. Or even use the cluster module, allowing you to start the new process before you've even shut down the old one (since cluster manages balancing traffic between its child instances).
One thing I haven't actually tested very far, is whether it's guaranteed safe to start a new server as soon as server.close() returns. If not, then the new server could potentially fail to bind. There's an example in the server.listen() docs about how to handle such an EADDRINUSE error.

How do I prevent node.js from crashing? try-catch doesn't work

From my experience, a php server would throw an exception to the log or to the server end, but node.js just simply crashes. Surrounding my code with a try-catch doesn't work either since everything is done asynchronously. I would like to know what does everyone else do in their production servers.
PM2
First of all, I would highly recommend installing PM2 for Node.js. PM2 is really great at handling crash and monitoring Node apps as well as load balancing. PM2 immediately starts the Node app whenever it crashes, stops for any reason or even when server restarts. So, if someday even after managing our code, app crashes, PM2 can restart it immediately. For more info, Installing and Running PM2
Other answers are really insane as you can read at Node's own documents at http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/process.html#process_event_uncaughtexception
If someone is using other stated answers read Node Docs:
Note that uncaughtException is a very crude mechanism for exception handling and may be removed in the future
Now coming back to our solution to preventing the app itself from crashing.
So after going through I finally came up with what Node document itself suggests:
Don't use uncaughtException, use domains with cluster instead. If you do use uncaughtException, restart your application after every unhandled exception!
DOMAIN with Cluster
What we actually do is send an error response to the request that triggered the error, while letting the others finish in their normal time, and stop listening for new requests in that worker.
In this way, domain usage goes hand-in-hand with the cluster module, since the master process can fork a new worker when a worker encounters an error. See the code below to understand what I mean
By using Domain, and the resilience of separating our program into multiple worker processes using Cluster, we can react more appropriately, and handle errors with much greater safety.
var cluster = require('cluster');
var PORT = +process.env.PORT || 1337;
if(cluster.isMaster)
{
cluster.fork();
cluster.fork();
cluster.on('disconnect', function(worker)
{
console.error('disconnect!');
cluster.fork();
});
}
else
{
var domain = require('domain');
var server = require('http').createServer(function(req, res)
{
var d = domain.create();
d.on('error', function(er)
{
//something unexpected occurred
console.error('error', er.stack);
try
{
//make sure we close down within 30 seconds
var killtimer = setTimeout(function()
{
process.exit(1);
}, 30000);
// But don't keep the process open just for that!
killtimer.unref();
//stop taking new requests.
server.close();
//Let the master know we're dead. This will trigger a
//'disconnect' in the cluster master, and then it will fork
//a new worker.
cluster.worker.disconnect();
//send an error to the request that triggered the problem
res.statusCode = 500;
res.setHeader('content-type', 'text/plain');
res.end('Oops, there was a problem!\n');
}
catch (er2)
{
//oh well, not much we can do at this point.
console.error('Error sending 500!', er2.stack);
}
});
//Because req and res were created before this domain existed,
//we need to explicitly add them.
d.add(req);
d.add(res);
//Now run the handler function in the domain.
d.run(function()
{
//You'd put your fancy application logic here.
handleRequest(req, res);
});
});
server.listen(PORT);
}
Though Domain is pending deprecation and will be removed as the new replacement comes as stated in Node's Documentation
This module is pending deprecation. Once a replacement API has been finalized, this module will be fully deprecated. Users who absolutely must have the functionality that domains provide may rely on it for the time being but should expect to have to migrate to a different solution in the future.
But until the new replacement is not introduced, Domain with Cluster is the only good solution what Node Documentation suggests.
For in-depth understanding Domain and Cluster read
https://nodejs.org/api/domain.html#domain_domain (Stability: 0 - Deprecated)
https://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html
Thanks to #Stanley Luo for sharing us this wonderful in-depth explanation on Cluster and Domains
Cluster & Domains
I put this code right under my require statements and global declarations:
process.on('uncaughtException', function (err) {
console.error(err);
console.log("Node NOT Exiting...");
});
works for me. the only thing i don't like about it is I don't get as much info as I would if I just let the thing crash.
As mentioned here you'll find error.stack provides a more complete error message such as the line number that caused the error:
process.on('uncaughtException', function (error) {
console.log(error.stack);
});
Try supervisor
npm install supervisor
supervisor app.js
Or you can install forever instead.
All this will do is recover your server when it crashes by restarting it.
forever can be used within the code to gracefully recover any processes that crash.
The forever docs have solid information on exit/error handling programmatically.
Using try-catch may solve the uncaught errors, but in some complex situations, it won't do the job right such as catching async function. Remember that in Node, any async function calls can contain a potential app crashing operation.
Using uncaughtException is a workaround but it is recognized as inefficient and is likely to be removed in the future versions of Node, so don't count on it.
Ideal solution is to use domain: http://nodejs.org/api/domain.html
To make sure your app is up and running even your server crashed, use the following steps:
use node cluster to fork multiple process per core. So if one process died, another process will be auto boot up. Check out: http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html
use domain to catch async operation instead of using try-catch or uncaught. I'm not saying that try-catch or uncaught is bad thought!
use forever/supervisor to monitor your services
add daemon to run your node app: http://upstart.ubuntu.com
hope this helps!
Give a try to pm2 node module it is far consistent and has great documentation. Production process manager for Node.js apps with a built-in load balancer. please avoid uncaughtException for this problem.
https://github.com/Unitech/pm2
Works great on restify:
server.on('uncaughtException', function (req, res, route, err) {
log.info('******* Begin Error *******\n%s\n*******\n%s\n******* End Error *******', route, err.stack);
if (!res.headersSent) {
return res.send(500, {ok: false});
}
res.write('\n');
res.end();
});
By default, Node.js handles such exceptions by printing the stack trace to stderr and exiting with code 1, overriding any previously set process.exitCode.
know more
process.on('uncaughtException', (err, origin) => {
console.log(err);
});
UncaughtException is "a very crude mechanism" (so true) and domains are deprecated now. However, we still need some mechanism to catch errors around (logical) domains. The library:
https://github.com/vacuumlabs/yacol
can help you do this. With a little of extra writing you can have nice domain semantics all around your code!

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