Node.js : graceful restarts and server uptime, how

Question

I've been working on a realtime app using Node.js and Socket.io, and I'd like to take it from the local testing stage to testing it out with some of our users. The trouble is, if I close the ssh session to my server it also stops the server I started using node app.js

I thought about using nohup, but I occasionally get segmentation faults or other random errors that bring down the server. I need to 1) know when (and hopefully why) my server crashed so I can both work on improving it to crash less and make sure to get it restarted. Additionally, I can't be awake 24/7 to restart the server myself, so having some sort of daemon would be lovely.

I found forever available via npm, but it isn't compatible with versions of Node more recent than 0.8.x and I'm running 0.9.1, and it doesn't seem like it gets maintained very well.

I also stumbled past distribution and up, but documentation and examples of building a decent app using them seem lacking.

Then there's this answer using the cluster and os modules. https://stackoverflow.com/a/10997753/1883464

But Node lists cluster as experimental http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html

With the lack of answers, examples, and discussion on keeping Node servers up and running (and updating their code!) in a real production environment I'm starting to feel like I'm the first person to want to take their app to deployment ;) Somehow I'm sure there are some common answers to this problem I haven't found.

Answer 1

The OS provided init system provides many advantages over any Node.js module. Hooking into the init system is the only way to ensure your app starts up automatically after a reboot.

We use Ubuntu and Upstart with a lot of success. Upstart will restart your application on crash, and can set the user-id/group before running your process. Do Not Run as Root.

Writing Upstart files is a bit of a pain, we use Node Foreman to automatically generate and export a set of upstart files from our applications Procfile.

npm i -g foreman
cd MY_APP
nf export -o /etc/init

This will place a set of upstart files into /etc/init that can be started and stopped with sudo start foreman and sudo stop foreman.

Upstart is not the only solution here, and the above can be adapted to suit other OSes as needed. On Redhat I recommend looking at systemd. I wouldn't recomment using Mac OSX for production, but in a pinch it has launchd.