Running and managing nodejs applications on single server

Question

Is there a good way to run and manage multiple nodejs apps on a single server?

I\'ve been looking at haibu and nodester, but they seem a little complex for what I am try

Answer 1

I wrote an app nodegod that I use for a handful deployments of maybe 10 apps each.

• nodegod reads an app list from json. It has an internal state machine for each app that handles the app life cycle in a safe manner including restarts, and the web page features stop/start/debug.

• The web interface uses web sockets, so that you can manage remote servers over ssh.

• As you deploy over rsync, apps restart automatically.

• Because nodegod monitors the stdout of other apps, you can capture an app's final breath like segfault and malloc errors.

• I use a fork of http-proxy in front of a slew of express instances, so any number of apps can share a single server port per dns for both http and web sockets.

I wrote a haraldops module to read app configuration from outside the source tree. With that you can monitor and get emails whenever something's up with an app.

App configurations I keep in a git repo in the file system.

It's not rocket science, and it all fits very nicely together. Only node and json: SIMPLE gets more done.

Answer 2

We're constantly trying to improve forever and haibu at Nodejitsu. Seems like the approach you're looking for here is a .forever configuration file for complex options. This feature has been on our backlog for a while now

https://github.com/nodejitsu/forever/issues/124

Check back. I consider it pretty high priority after the next round of performance improvements.

Answer 3

If your server has upstart, just use it. I have no luck with forever and similar. If you want to proceed with upstart, roco would be nice as deployment solution:

roco deploy:setup:upstart
roco deploy

Answer 4

I use Supervisord & Monit, more details and configuration example here: Process Management at Bringr.

Moreover you can specify environnement variable directly from the supervisord configuration file (see sub-process environment). But I personally prefer to add these variables directly inside a ~/.bashrc on each machine.

If the port number isn't going to change for each application (but change between production & development environment). I'll recommend to specify them inside a config.json (or directly inside package.json). And the config.json will contain a different port number for each application depending on the environnement:

{
 myapp:{
  production:{port:8080},
  development:{port:3000}
 }
}

And inside myapp.js:

 var config = require('./config');
 app.listen(config.myapp[process.env.NODE_ENV].port)

With process.env.NODE_ENV declared in ~/.bashrc.

Answer 5

These days I've taken to using dokku which is a OSS clone of heroku. Deploying is as simple as making sure your package.json contains a start script. For example:

"scripts": {
  "start": "node index.js"
}

Sample App