Forever Node JS startup or stop/starting

Question

I'm fairly new to all of this, so I apologize. My search has not yielded me an answer yet and I'm still testing around.

I have an Node JS app thats started by Forever on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Several requirements I'm trying to figure out:

1. Start automatically on boot
2. Being able to restart the app manually

I configured an Upstart script and it works fine, but I have no way of stopping the process correctly. I think the issue is because Upstart is looking for a PID and Forever creates a PID but doesn't tell Upstart? So when I try to stop, it doesn't know how to kill the correct process.

Here's a sample of what I'm trying to do:

#start on startup
#stop on shutdown

expect daemon

env NODE_BIN_DIR=""
env NODE_PATH=""
env APPLICATION_DIRECTORY=""
env APPLICATION_START=""
env NODE_ENV=""

#pre-start script
#sleep 15
#end script

script
    PATH=$NODE_BIN_DIR:$PATH
    cd /vol01/web/iin
    exec sudo -u ubuntu forever -a -l $LOG -e $eLog  start $APPLICATION_START
end script

pre-stop script
    PATH=$NODE_BIN_DIR:$PATH
    exec forever stop $APPLICATION_START
end script

I'm beginning to think the best way for me to go about this is to run a cron job on boot that would run a script to run the forever node. This script would include stopping the application and starting and I could invoke the script manually. Thoughts?

Answer 1

I use something similar to this:

#!upstart

description "your fancy description"
author "Your Name <youremail@fqdn>"

# start on every run level, 2 is the one on Ubuntu
start on runlevel [2345]

# stop on halt, maintenance or reboot
stop on runlevel [016]

# start our application with the user `user`
exec sudo -u user -i NODE_ENV=production /path/to/bin/for/forever start /home/user/path/to/server >> /home/user/path/to/server/syslog 2>&1

# starting log
pre-start script
  echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (sys) Starting" >> /home/user/path/to/server/syslog 2>&1
end script

If you want to split the logs, define a custome PID, etc, you can use forever's argv options to accomplish this.

If you want to have commands available to your script like stop|start|restart you can follow along with this great article: https://www.exratione.com/2013/02/nodejs-and-forever-as-a-service-simple-upstart-and-init-scripts-for-ubuntu/