Start app as root with pm2

Question

I have a daemon that must be run as root on startup.

I use pm2 to start other apps but can not figure out if it can start an app as root. Can it be done?

If not, what are my options?

Answer 1

You should start pm2 as a root, (sudo pm2 start app.js), then your app will start as a root

Answer 2

First, install pm2 globally. Then set root permissions to pm2 using this command

sudo chown ubuntu:ubuntu /home/ubuntu/.pm2/rpc.sock /home/ubuntu/.pm2/pub.sock

Answer 3

If you only need your daemon to be run as root in order to access a port number (such as 80 or 443), the pm2 documentation recommends using authbind. So, if you want the user yourusername to have access to port 80, run:

$ sudo apt-get install authbind
$ sudo touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
$ sudo chown yourusername /etc/authbind/byport/80
$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/authbind/byport/80
$ authbind --deep pm2 update

And then use authbind --deep pm2 instead of pm2. The documentation suggests setting up an alias.

Answer 4

I would recommend:

sudo pm2 start index.js

OR

pm2 start 'http-server' /var/www -p 80
sudo pm2 startup
pm2 save

OR

pm2 start 'which http-server' /var/www -p 80

To start it on your HTTP Port

Also, I always put -i 0 at the end - this starts up as many worker processes as you have cores. Check THIS

It is not always necessary to start PM2 as root. If you have PM2 as root and the cli module installed, security is a big risk. This is only required if you're starting your app on a port between 1 and 1024

Answer 5

I had problems with sudo pm2 start api, but this was since pm2 was already running without sudo privileges, therefor you need to run:

pm2 kill
sudo pm2 start api

This kills the pm2 deamon first, so that it starts in sudo, but then you need sudo for ALL pm2 commands afterwards, like: sudo pm2 ls