During development it would be great to have node.js restarted automatically when changes occur in the applications directory. When the application is in production, node could be start just like normally. When the server is rebooted with or without intention, node needs obviously to be restarted.
I've heard about and tried both forever and supervisor. Supervisor works good, but I can't make it to start during boot. Forever on the other hand ignores any changes in my directory.
Are there alternatives that are available that would do all this for me?
Thanks
Here's what I ended up doing:
Below code was put in /etc/init/myApplication.conf:
# Enter below
respawn
console none
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [06]
script
sudo always /var/www/backend/app.js > /var/www/backend/nodelog.log
end script
Always checks for changes in my node directory while this script ensures that always is started on boot.
I've recently started using Foreman to manage my apps. You can export from Foreman to Upstart which should solve your problem with handling reboots, etc. in a production environment (although I haven't done this myself yet.)
For automatically updating files on change, check out always. (Then run always from your local Procfile through Foreman - that's my setup.)
I don't think you are likely to find anything that automatically starts node on boot, but depending on your OS, this isn't very difficult. Could you tell us what your OS is?
Related
I have an issue with later versions of ES, so have to use 7.10.2 currently.
This means that the previous method I used to install ES as a service, i.e. apt-get, doesn't work You can't choose an older version this way: it currently installs 7.16.3.
So I followed the procedure on this page for 7.10: everything worked: I was able to run ES as an app and also as a "daemon". Clearly I could simply put the "daemon" startup line in a script which runs on boot.
But what's the optimum way of turning this "daemon arrangement" into a service which you can control with systemctl, and which starts automatically when the machine boots?
PS I don't want to get involved with Docker. I'm sure that's a useful thing but I'm convinced there is a simpler way of doing it, using available Linux sys tools.
I found a workaround... this doesn't in fact create a service of the "systemd" type which can be controlled by systemctl. There seem to be one or two problems which make this non-trivial.
1) You can't start ES as root! I assume (not sure) that most services are being run by root. Anyway this was something I couldn't find a solution to.
2) I am not sure whether a shell script file called by a service is allowed to end... or should continue endlessly: initially I thought this would be sufficient. This is a shell script (run_es_daemon.sh) which does indeed start up ES (as a daemon process) when run by manually in a terminal. There is no issue to do with the fact that the script ends and you then close the terminal: the daemon process continues to run:
#!/bin/bash
# start ES as a daemon...
cd /home/mike/Elasticsearch/elasticsearch-7.10.2
./bin/elasticsearch -d -p pid
... but it never worked using a xxx.service file in /etc/systemd/system/ (maybe because of 1) above). So I also tried adding these lines under the above ones:
while true
do
echo "bubbles"
sleep 60
done
... didn't work either.
In the end I found a simple workaround solution was to start up the daemon process by using crontab:
#reboot /home/mike/sysadmin/run_es_daemon.sh
... but I'd still like to know how to set it up as a true service, which starts at boot...
I am having difficult times, trying to make my NodeJS scripts run on windows server 2012. Or more precisely, to make it robust.
I have installed PM2, whic his great, also added service for windows startup which works fine, but now I found biggest issue I can't solve.
When windows server user start pm2 start, directly on server or through ssh, when logging out, all pm2 scripts are gone.
I've tried to look into pm2-windows-service but that seems inconsistent, when I restart service, it works fine, but sometimes I need to manually reload o restart only 1 script and then whole list of pm2 scripts gets somehow detached or attached to user, so when I log out from server it's all gone again.
I can't find solution to have watcher/autorestart on scripts, and make them run as a service regardless of user being logged in/out.
There must be solution for running multiple nodejs scripts on windows ?
Once you launch your NodeJS processes, you should run pm2 save command. That way, your stated scripts are saved.
Your attached/dettached problems may be due a relative path configuration in the service env variables. Try moving to an absolute path.
Note: PM2 recommendation is to launch commands with an admin-privileged user; otherwise inconsistences may appear.
Note (2): Bare in mind that PM2 on Windows has some issues. For example, if you restart your server, most of the times processes dissapear from pm2 ls (they noted that Windows does not have the feature to restore saved instances). If you saved them, pm2 resurrect will restore them.
I created a cronjob with sudo crontab -u USERNAME -e and tried to start my node.js app after each reboot.
It had worked well at another server.
But this time, I installed the Node.js via nvm
Then tried to run the same cronjob lines, but every time after reboot it failed. I tried to figure out all the related folders and tried again to run as different lines. When I check with forever list, server shows that no process is running.
#reboot /home/USERNAME/.npm/forever start -c /home/USERNAME/.nvm/current/bin/node /home/USERNAME/APPNAME/app
#reboot /home/USERNAME/.npm/forever start /home/USERNAME/APPNAME/app
#reboot /usr/local/bin/forever start -c /home/USERNAME/.nvm/current/bin/node /home/USERNAME/APPNAME/app
I think that the reason is somehow related with nvm. But I am not sure of that. I don't want to do anything unnecessary unless I am fully sure about it.
Edited July 26, 2015
Though I have used the npm's forever module to deploy nodejs production apps, I really do not see the need to use it on linux based servers as there are so many system level alternatives available.
One of them is upstart. It will help you run your scripts as system level services. Amazon Web Services also use upstart in their Elastic Beanstalk nodejs tiers to keep nodejs apps running forever.
If you really just need to get down to it, here is a link to run your nodejs app as an upstart service.
However, it is not limited to deploying nodejs apps only and if you learn upstart, you will be able to do a lot of things with it. Here is a link for that as well.
If your original approach was preferable (as it was in my case) you can fix your scheduled cron job by explicitly passing the path to node like this: (found in this answer)
#reboot /root/.nvm/versions/node/v7.1.0/bin/node /root/.nvm/versions/node/v7.1.0/bin/forever start /var/www/server.json
Apparently NVM works in magic by setting up some system paths which aren't setup at the moment the cron jobs run.
I'm trying to configure PM2 to daemonize a simple node.js server on centos. The init.d script executes, and there are no errors, but pm2 list returns an empty list, and the server is not starting.
Originally, I was attempting to start the process as a different user (for those interested, this can be done with modifications to pm2-init.sh). But due to the complication, I decided to first try to get it to run as root.
The strange symptom of the problem is that the dump.pm2 file is being emptied by some process, thus the pm2 resurrect has nothing to do. I set up pm2 to run on reboot as follows
$ pm2 startup centos
$ pm2 start /path/to/my/server.js
$ pm2 save
At this point, dump.pm2 had a large JSON object in it and the server is running. Then, running:
$ reboot
... wait and log back in
$ pm2 list
It was empty again, and so was the dump.pm2!
I'm not sure what process is clearing this file. I've tried reinstalling and re-running the startup script to no avail. Any help is greatly appreciated.
As a temporary workaround, I set the dump file as immutable:
$ chattr +i /path/to/my/dump.pm2
This worked. Although not ideal, it is what I will use until I can determine why the dump.pm2 file is being emptied.
I wrote a simple JAVA application which runs as a service. When my application is up and running, I maintain the PID in a file which will be used while stopping the application.
Issue:
When I restart the OS the stop script is not called (not sure how to make this happen) and the old PID is left as it is in the PID file. Now, after reboot (which start my app) when I stop the app using stop script now my stop script will try to clean up all the PID listed in the file. Most of the time, I will get "No such process". But there are chance the same PID might have been used for some other process
Question:
How I can make sure my stop script will be invoked when I shutdown ore reboot the OS? I am looking a solution for RHEL environment.
I think your are looking for a init script. (startup/shutdown services at different run levels)
This is a good reference
http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2009/09/30/one-java-init-script/
this has a good refernce to Linux init.d scripts
http://coreymaynard.com/blog/creating-a-custom-initd-script-on-fedora/
Hope it helps
If you are looking for scripts that run after reboot, I guess you can write the script in /etc/rc.local and then you can start your service.
This script will run after all your init scripts have run while your machine starts. Using this you can delete the old PID file.