How to publish applications done in Node.js

Question

Well, I’m new with Node.js, I was able to build an example application, I learned a lot from Node with Express, but I can’t understand how to publish the application on the linux server. Does anyone know how to publish? I would have to create a process for it to automatically run the command node app.js ?

Note: The Server has the Node installed.

Answer 1

There are some ways. The ones I know are:

• Using the package forever: https://www.npmjs.org/package/forever
• Using the supervisord + nodemon
  • supervisord: http://supervisor/ (is not package of Node.js)
  • nodemon: https://www.npmjs.org/package/nodemon

Just send the files to the server, configure the Express to serve in an accessible door and execute your server.js using one of the above.

If you need to redirect the port, use the nginx: http://nginx.org/en/download.html

Answer 2

you will need to create a service start script using the packages cited by @Cigano

#!/bin/bash
JSHOME=/opt/homeapp #home de suas apps..
DIR=$JSHOME/js/ #diretorio dos apps
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin #caso tenha o node fora do path padrão
NODE_PATH=$JSHOME/node_modules #path com pacotes para seu app questão de isolamento
# no final ficaria algo como
# app em /opt/homeapp/js/appfile.js
# nodepath como /opt/homeapp/js/node_modules
NODE=node
NODE_ENV=production
APP="appfile"
test -x `which $NODE` || exit 0
function start_app {
        ###note que NODE_ENV e NODE_PATH são variaveis definidas para o ambiente de execução do nohup
        # o | cronolog é opcional... fiz para registrar logs por data.. cronolog é velho não use se não precisar
        NODE_PATH=$NODE_PATH NODE_ENV=$NODE_ENV nohup $NODE $DIR/${APP}.js | /usr/sbin/cronolog $DIR/log/%Y/%m/%d/${APP}.log 2>&1 &
        echo $! > "$DIR/${APP}.pid"
}
function stop_app {
        killall node > /dev/null 2>&1
        echo ok
}
case $1 in
        start)
                start_app 
        ;;
        stop)
                stop_app
        ;;
        restart)
                stop_app
                start_app
        ;;
        *)
                echo "usage: render-image {start|stop}" ;;
esac
exit 0

Answer 3

You just need to add this snippet of code to your package.json:

"scripts": {
    "start": "node app.js"
}

You can add numerous commands that run at various times in the lifecycle of your package. For more details you can take a look at this link where it has all the specification.

By default the server expects to find a file server.js at the root of the project, as in your case the file you need to run is the app.js you need to specify it.

Below an example of a package.json simple that will serve p/ you.

{
    "name": "[NOME DA SUA APLICAÇÃO]",
    "version": "[VERSÃO]",
    "private": true,
    "scripts": {
        "start": "node app.js"
    },
    "dependencies": {
        "express": "~3.4.8"
    }
}

If your application is still working locally and not on your server, it is likely that the port you are reporting is not the one specified by the server. For example I use as a server the Appfog, and the port to be used by the application is informed via an environment variable process.env.VCAP_APP_PORT.

In my application it is more or less like this:

app.set("port", process.env.VCAP_APP_PORT || 3000);
...
http.createServer(app).listen(app.get("port"));