Hosting a keystonejs app with openshift

Question

I keep getting a 503 but no errors in the log when trying to host my keystone.js app on openshift, has anyone successfully hosted a keystone app with them? Everything works fine on localhost.

I am using a fresh install of keystone.js with no blog or cloudinary.

Answer 1

Your providing very little information to give you a definitive answer. What options are you passing to keystone.init()? Are you using dotenv? If so, what are you setting there? Did you set any environment variables using rhc set-env?

I ask because a common (though not by far the only) culprit of 503 errors in Node.js applications on OpenShift is a port number overriding OpenShift's. Keystone looks at process.env.PORT before it looks at process.env.OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_PORT. So, if you have PORT set on your .env or with rhc set-env it will take precedence over OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_PORT.

I came across a similar question on the KeystoneJS Google Group. In that other case the developer had added a MONGODB cartridge to his app, but had not set the connection string for the cartridge in Keystone.

If this is your case as well you need to set the Keystone mongo option in Keystone.init() or using Keystone.set('mongo', 'connection_sring'). When you created the cartridge you got a url and some credentials. OpenShit passes these to your application in environment variables. You can build the mongo connection string as follows:

var connectionString = process.env.OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_USERNAME + ":" +  process.env.OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_PASSWORD + "@" + process.env.OPENSHIFT_MONGODB_DB_HOST + '/' + process.env.OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME;

keystone.set('mongo', connectionString);

or 

keystone.init({
  ...
  mongo: connectionString,
  ...
});

Or you can use rhc set-env to set the MONGO environment variable as follows:

rhc set-env MONGO=http://{username}:{password}@{connection url}/{dbname} -a your_app_name

The connection url above is the one you got from OpenShift when you created the cartridge. If looks like a standard MONGODB url (e.g. mongodb://127.6.85.129:27017/).

These are just my best guesses, given that your question is a bit thin on details. You may want to post some more specifics so we can more accurately assess your problem.