rolling-deploy example relies on nodejs_forever which was removed from geerlingguy.nodejs

[mattjmcnaughton]

I was working my way through the rolling-deploy example and noticed that any commands involving forever failed with 'No such file or directory'. I then noticed that this commit to geerlingguy.nodejs removed the nodejs_forever variable. However, rolling-deploy still sets nodejs_forever: true in provision.yml to install forever.

What is the best way to installforever with the newest version of the geerlingguy.nodejs role.

Thanks for an awesome book :)

[geerlingguy]

Oops! I'll have to fix that. The best way to get it installed in the mean time is with:

nodejs_npm_global_packages:
  - forever

Or with a version:

nodejs_npm_global_packages:
  - name: forever
    version: 0.15.3

[mattjmcnaughton]

Thanks for the quick response! Unfortunately, I tried adding this variable to provision.yml, and I'm still getting the same error message. When I ssh'd to the vagrant machine with vagrant ssh, I noticed that forever was available when I was running as the vagrant user, but not when I was root. And if I'm understanding correctly, the ansible playbook runs as root. But I thought that installing the package globally would have also installed it for root?

Thanks for your help :)

[geerlingguy]

@mattjmcnaughton - I'm taking a look at this now.

[geerlingguy]

Yeah, in this case it looks like there's some extra trickery going on to get forever into the path /usr/local/lib/npm/bin/forever, and when I use sudo it's not in my path.

Two options are to:

1. Doubly ensure that global packages are installed under the sudo user (in which case it goes to /usr/bin/forever and is accessible everywhere) (maybe there's a bug in my role?)
2. Run the app deployment as the ansible_ssh_user instead of using sudo/become.

[geerlingguy]

@mattjmcnaughton - Aha! It looks like I had to set the following vars:

    nodejs_install_npm_user: root
    npm_config_prefix: "/usr"
    nodejs_npm_global_packages:
      - forever

Because that new config prefix is the parent directory inside which Node.js' global installs will be in the bin. Pushing up a fix soon, and I'll fix it in the book as well.