Node Bootstrap is a project skeleton for Node.js 0.8.x+ and Express.js development with Twitter's Bootstrap (no pun intended) framework.
Project skeleton provides: common node.js webapp layout for responsive web development, suggests some common Node modules and best-practices, as well as provides two convenient shell scripts:
- dev_start.sh will start your server.js node app in single-CPU mode with hot-realoading of code enabled.
- start.sh will start your server.js without hot-reloading, but with as many child processes as you have CPU cores.
By default, dev_start.sh also lets Express.js handle static files so you don't have to have a web server. The production version: start.sh assumes you want your web-server (Nginx?) to take on this job.
We try to keep Node Bootstrap updated with the latest versions of Node, Express and Bootstrap. In some cases, where it makes sense, branches compatible with older versions are created: https://github.com/inadarei/nodebootstrap/branches to make upgrade path a little smoother.
Assuming you already have node and npm installed (If not: this blog post can help on Debian/Ubuntu and you can figure out similar steps, with the help of HomeBrew on Mac):
> npm install supervisor -g
> npm install
> chmod u+x dev_start.sh
> ./dev_start.sh
You should see a simple "hello" at: http://localhost:3000/hello. You can customize it by visiting http://localhost:3000/hello?name=yourname but really what you should probably do instead is dive into the code and see how it is put together.
Following environmental variables can affect the runtime behavior and startup mode:
- NODE_LAUNCH_SCRIPT - defaults to "server.js"
- NODE_ENV - defaults to "production"
- NODE_CLUSTERED - defaults to 1 (on)
- NODE_HOT_RELOAD - defaults to 0 (off)
- NODE_SERVE_STATIC - defaults to 0 (off) - in production you should serve static content with NginX, not: Node.
- NODE_CONFIG_DIR - defaults to "config" folder in the current folder
- NODE_LOG_DIR - defaults to "logs" folder in the current folder
It's not a bad idea to use more expressive name than default server.js for your main script. If you run multiple scripts on the server it can really help differentiate between various forever or "ps" processes. However, if you do rename server.js, please make sure to also update corresponding lines in start.sh script.
Most of the launch logic is located in start.sh. By looking at dev_start.sh you can see that it is just altering some environmental variables. Following this pattern you can easily create launch scripts for other environments e.g. stage_start.sh, if needed.
In production environments it is a good idea to daemon-ize your Node process using Forever.js. Forever will restart the process if it accidentally crashes.
In development, it is much more important to have "hot-reloading" of code available. This feature can be provided with Supervisor.js package. If you set NODE_HOT_RELOAD to 1, start.sh will run in hot-reloading mode watching your main script, libs folder and config folder.
Unfortunately, Supervisor and Forever packages do not work nicely with each other, so you can only use one or the other, at this point. Setting NODE_HOT_RELOAD to 1 disables backgrounding of your script and runs your Node application in foreground (which, to be fair, in most cases, is what you probably want during development, anyway).
Hot reloading uses native file watching features of *nix systems. This is extremely handy and efficient, but unfortunately most systems have very low limits on watched and open files. If you use hot reloading a lot, you should expect to see: "Error: watch EMFILE" or similar.
To solve the problem you need to raise your filesystem limits. This may be a two-step process. On Linux, there're hard limits (something root user can change in /etc/limits.conf or /ets/security/limits.conf) that govern the limits individual users can alter from command-line.
Put something like this (as root) in your /etc/limits.conf or /etc/security/limits.conf:
* hard nofile 10000Then log out, log back in and run:
> ulimit -n 10000You should probably put ulimit -n 10000 in your .profile file, because it does not persist between restarts.
For OS-X and Solaris-specific instructions see a Stackoverflow Answer
On certain Linux distributions you may also need to raise iNotify limit:
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances=16384 && echo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances=16384 | sudo tee /etc/rc.local And last, but not least, it's a good idea to also run:
> sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=40960 kern.maxfilesperproc=20480(The MIT License)
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