How can I automatically start a node.js application in Amazon Linux AMI on aws?

Solution 1:

One way is to create an upstart job. That way your app will start once Linux loads, will restart automatically if it crashes, and you can start / stop / restart it by sudo start yourapp / sudo stop yourapp / sudo restart yourapp.

Here are beginning steps:

1) Install upstart utility (may be pre-installed if you use a standard Amazon Linux AMI):

sudo yum install upstart

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install upstart

2) Create upstart script for your node app:

in /etc/init add file yourappname.conf with the following lines of code:

#!upstart
description "your app name"

start on started mountall
stop on shutdown

# Automatically Respawn:
respawn
respawn limit 99 5

env NODE_ENV=development

# Warning: this runs node as root user, which is a security risk
# in many scenarios, but upstart-ing a process as a non-root user
# is outside the scope of this question
exec node /path_to_your_app/app.js >> /var/log/yourappname.log 2>&1

3) start your app by sudo start yourappname

Solution 2:

You can use forever-service for provisioning node script as a service and automatically starting during boots. Following commands will do the needful,

npm install -g forever-service
forever-service install test

This will provision app.js in the current directory as a service via forever. The service will automatically restart every time system is restarted. Also when stopped it will attempt a graceful stop. This script provisions the logrotate script as well.

Github url: https://github.com/zapty/forever-service

As of now forever-service supports Amazon Linux, CentOS, Redhat support for other Linux distro, Mac and Windows are in works..

NOTE: I am the author of forever-service.

Solution 3:

Quick solution for you would be to start your app from /etc/rc.local ; just add your command there.

But if you want to go the elegant way, you'll have to package your application in a rpm file, have a startup script that goes in /etc/rc.d so that you can use chkconfig on your app, then install the rpm on your instance.

Maybe this or this help. (or just google for "creating rpm packages")

Solution 4:

You can create a script that can start and stop your app and place it in /etc/init.d; make the script adhere to chkconfig's conventions (below), and then use chkconfig to set it to start when other services are started.

You can pick an existing script from /etc/init.d to use as an example; this article describes the requirements, which are basically:

• An executable script that identifies the shell needed (i.e., #!/bin/bash)
• A comment of the form # chkconfig: where is often 345, startprio indicates where in the order of services to start, and stopprio is where in the order of services to stop. I generally pick a similar service that already exists and use that as a guide for these values (i.e., if you have a web-related service, start at the same levels as httpd, with similar start and stop priorities).

Once your script is set up, you can use

 chkconfig --add yourscript 
 chkconfig yourscript on 

and you should be good to go. (Some distros may require you to manually symlink to the script to /etc/init.d/rc.d, but I believe your AWS distro will do that for you when you enable the script.