Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
164 lines (119 loc) · 4.47 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

164 lines (119 loc) · 4.47 KB
Raw

Installing node and system dependencies

Once in an SSH session the first thing to do is get Node.js. NVM (Node Version Manager) is a pretty great way to install Node.js and allows you to easily switch versions if required.

To install NVM just run this command (same as in the NVM installation instructions).

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.32.1/install.sh | bash

source ~/.bashrc

install node

nvm install 7

To check node is ready to go just echo the version.

node --version

Creating a public HTTP endpoint

we are going to make a public URL anyone can request from the browser to get a response from the server.

Make a directory for the server and cd into it.

mkdir server
cd server

Now you are in your server directory, you need to npm init

npm init

This will create a package.json file which will be used to track any dependencies we use. npm init will ask for a load of info, I tend to just press enter to use all the defaults.

All we will need to run our server is the express package. To install express and add it to package.json.

npm install express --save-dev

Now we just need to add some code to run the server. We will use nano to write the server in an index.js file.

cat > index.js <<EOF
const express = require('express')
const app = express()
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('HEY!')
})
app.listen(3000, () => console.log('Server running on port 3000'))
EOF

The server I used just responds with “HEY!” when you do a request to /. I listen to requests on port 3000.

go to the Security Groups tab in the EC2 console. Right click the security group you setup and click edit inbound rules. Click Add Rule. This time we are going to use a custom TCP rule on port 3000, open to anywhere.

Now we can use node to start the server!

Using a browser, visit your public DNS URL with port 3000 and you should see the HEY! response.

node index.js

Serving HTTP traffic on the standard port, 80

  • install restart nginx and reload it
sudo apt install nginx
sudo systemctl restart nginx
sudo systemctl reload nginx
  • update configuration file .
sudo rm -rf /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
  • update default file
server {
       listen 80;
       listen [::]:80;

       server_name 54.157.197.164;

       location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }
}
  • restart nginx and reload it
sudo systemctl restart nginx
sudo systemctl reload nginx
sudo systemctl status nginx

Using a browser, visit your public DNS URL and you should see the HEY! response.

To leave the server running when we log out, we need to press ctrl+z to pause the process (this only works when your server is running, node index.js). When you press ctrl+z you will be presented with all jobs, in this case the only one there will be the Node.js job that was paused.

You can see that the job number for node index.js is 1 (as noted by [1]+). To run that in the background, use the bg command.

bg %1

Then logout

exit

You should still be able to access your URL and see the “HEY!” response.

Now visit your server’s public DNS URL, using port 80 and you should see the HEY! response.

Keeping the Node.js process running

It’s quite tedious using ctrl+z to pause a process, and then running it in the background. Also, doing it this way will not allow the Node.js process to restart when you restart your server after an update or crash.

Before moving forward, stop your running node process

killall -9 node

To keep these processes running we are going to use a great NPM package called PM2. While in an SSH session, install PM2 globally.

npm i -g pm2

To start your server, simply use pm2 to execute index.js.

pm2 start server/index.js

To make sure that your PM2 restarts when your server restarts

pm2 startup

This will print out a line of code you need to run depending on the server you are using. Run the code it outputs.

Finally, save the current running processes so they are run when PM2 restarts.

pm2 save

That’s it! You can log out/in to SSH, even restart your server and it will continue to run on port 80.