nodejs 'forever' just doesn't do anything

13
votes

I am trying to run my nodejs app on an Amazon EC2 instance using forever. I installed nodejs npm, and then ran sudo npm install forever -g.
The installation didn't return any errors, so i go ahead and try running my app using forever start server.js, but it won't do anything - no output what-so-ever, not even an error.
I also tried forever --help and just forever, but none of them giving me any response...

When running my app regularly using nodejs - nodejs init.js then it works as expected, but i need to get it running using forever so it won't shut down when i disconnect from the server.

Edit :
Since the only problem i was having was that nodejs was closing when i closed the terminal session to my EC2 server, I solved this by using the linux nohup command like this :
nohup sudo nodejs server.js &
This kept nodejs running in a child process even after I closed the terminal window.

Thanks for the help though! :)

5
node.jsamazon-ec2forever
Yes, but if the script crasches you have to manually launch it again. How do you manage that? - Darko Romanov

5 Answers

16
votes

I was also not receiving any stdout input from any forever command and this fix nailed it:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/node

Hope that helps someone.

2
votes

I don't know if this will help, but as an alternative, you can use upstart. Create a script like this:

#this is the upstart service task. move it to /etc/init/nodeapp.conf

description "server for Node App"
author "Neels Grobler"

chdir /root/servers/nodeapp
exec node init.js 1>stdout.log 2>stderr.log
respawn

And run it by typing start nodeapp. To stop type stop nodeapp. You can also change the script so that the node app starts on system boot etc. More info at upstart.ubuntu.com

2
votes

You should be using forever start server.js not just forever server.js

1
votes

Several guesses.

  • If you install using sudo npm install forever -g, you might need to sudo to run forever.
  • Put a full path of server.js when you run forever such as forever start /home/you/source/server.js or sudo forever start /home/you/source/server.js
1
votes

On windows, when you run forever like:

forever start app.js

you can find generated log file in file system at:

C:\Users\USERNAME\.forever\SomeLogFileHere.txt

The log files are regenerated for every running script with unique identicator of each file. You can always check which file belongs to which process by:

forever list