Keep meteor running on amazon EC2

Question

I have a simple meteor app that I'm running on an Amazon EC2 server. Everything is working great. I start it manually with my user via meteor in the project directory.

However, what I would like is for this app to

1. Run on boot
2. Be immune to hangups

I try running it via nohup meteor &, but when I try to log out of the EC2 instance, I get the "You have running jobs" message. Continuing to log out stops the app.

How can I get the app to start on startup and stay up (unless it crashes for some reason)?

Answer 1

Install forever and use a start script.

$ npm install -g forever

I have several scripts for managing my production environment - the start script looks something like:

#!/bin/bash

forever stopall

export MAIL_URL=...
export MONGO_URL=...
export MONGO_OPLOG_URL=...
export PORT=3000
export ROOT_URL=...
forever start /home/ubuntu/apps/myapp/bundle/main.js

exit 0

Conveniently, it will also append to a log file in ~/.forever which will show any errors encountered while running your app. You can get the location of the log file and other stats about your app with:

$ forever list

To get your app to start on startup, you'd need to do something appropriate for your flavor of linux. You can maybe just put the start script in /etc/rc.local. For ubuntu see this question.

Also note you really should be bundling your app if using it in production. See this comparison for more details on the differences.

Answer 2

I am using upstart on Ubuntu server which you should be able to easily install on Amazon linux.

This is roughly my /etc/init/myapp.conf:

start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE=eth0)
stop on shutdown

respawn
respawn limit 99 5

script
    export HOME="/home/deploy"
    export NODE_ENV="production"
    export MONGO_URL="mongodb://localhost:27017/myappdb"
    export ROOT_URL=http://localhost
    export MAIL_URL=smtp://localhost:25
    export METEOR_SETTINGS='{"somesetting":true}'

    cd /var/www/myapp/bundle/
    exec sudo -u deploy PORT=3000 /usr/bin/node main.js >> /var/log/node.log 2>&1
end script

I can then manually start and stop myapp like this:

sudo start myapp
sudo stop myapp

Answer 3

I believe this package solves your problem: https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up

which seems to use forever: https://github.com/nodejitsu/forever