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node-forever

This is a script to launch node's forever script at boot time on a FreeBSD system. When I Googled, all I found was this script, which doesn't make me happy. It doesn't really get how FreeBSD's rc(8) subsystem and rc.subr(8) are expected to work. I've taken jellea's script and radically reworked it. I suppose The Right Way™ to do it would be to fork it, but this was such a significant rewrite that I didn't think that made sense.

Installation

  1. Copy the script to /usr/local/etc/rc.d. Name it node-forever instead of node-forever.sh.
  2. Set values in /etc/rc.conf or /etc/rc.conf.local. There are a few minimum values that are required.
  • forever_enable="YES"
  • forever_script="/path/to/your/script"
  • forever_scriptargs="--args --for --your --script"
  1. Try it out with something like sudo service node-forever start

Example Configuration

This is similar to what I have in my own /etc/rc.conf file. It's not many lines because I like most of the defaults.

forever_enable="YES"
forever_sourcedir="/home/paco/myApp"
forever_workingdir="/home/paco/myApp"
forever_script="node_modules/http-server/bin/http-server"
forever_scriptargs="/home/paco/myApp/app -r -p 8000 -c-1"

Usage

Action Command
Start the service sudo service node-forever start
Stop the service sudo service node-forever stop
Restart the service sudo service node-forever restart
Check Status sudo service node-forever status

Warning

This script runs forever as the www user, which is customary. It can be configured to run as any user at all. Be aware that it will create a bunch of files and directories and chown those file to that user. By default, it creates:

  • /var/log/forever-err.log
  • /var/log/forever-out.log
  • /var/log/forever.log
  • /var/run/forever.pid
  • /var/run/forever (directory)

Limitation

Although forever itself is perfectly capable of creating, managing, starting, and stopping, lots of different commands, this script only does ONE. It assumes you're only starting a single command with forever. In particular, it's invoking referring to the process by ID 0 when you invoke stop or restart on this rc script.

Optional Configurations

You will probably want to create a file like /usr/local/etc/newsyslog.conf.d/node-forever and put some lines in it like this:

/var/log/forever.log                        640  7     *    @T00  JC
/var/log/forever-out.log                    640  7     *    @T00  JC
/var/log/forever-err.log                    640  7     *    @T00  JC

You could put those directly into /etc/newsyslog.conf or in a file in /etc/newsyslog.conf.d, but there are advantages to making it a file that you just install. And putting it parallel to /usr/local/etc/rc.d is good.

Complete Documentation

These are all the variables the script recognises.

Variable Default Meaning
forever_enable NO Set to "YES" to enable the daemon. Won't run otherwise.
forever_user www User that forever will run as. Will own log files, too.
forever_root /var/run/forever Where to put forever's management files and sockets.
forever_sourcedir /usr/local/lib/node_modules For --sourceDir
forever_workingdir /usr/local/lib/node_modules For --workingDir
forever_forever /usr/local/bin/forever The forever binary to invoke.
forever_flags -a Any miscellaneous flags for forever
forever_script (none) The name of your script. E.g. node_modules/http-server/bin/http-server
forever_scriptargs (none) Arguments to your script. E.g., /path/to/my/app -r -p 8000 -c-1
forever_max (none) For -m MAX
forever_logfile /var/log/forever.log Logs the forever output to LOGFILE. For -l
forever_outfile /var/log/forever-out.log Logs stdout from child script to OUTFILE. For -o
forever_errfile /var/log/forever-err.log Logs stderr from child script to ERRFILE. For -e
forever_pid /var/run/forever.pid The PID file for forever itself, so rc.subr(8) can kill it.
forever_nodeenv PRODUCTION Sets NODE_ENV to this value before invoking forever