I have a simple meteor app that I'm running on an Amazon EC2 server. Everything is working great. I start it manually with my user via meteor in the project directory.
However, what I would like is for this app to
I try running it via nohup meteor &, but when I try to log out of the EC2 instance, I get the "You have running jobs" message. Continuing to log out stops the app.
How can I get the app to start on startup and stay up (unless it crashes for some reason)?
Install forever and use a start script.
$ npm install -g forever
I have several scripts for managing my production environment - the start script looks something like:
#!/bin/bash
forever stopall
export MAIL_URL=...
export MONGO_URL=...
export MONGO_OPLOG_URL=...
export PORT=3000
export ROOT_URL=...
forever start /home/ubuntu/apps/myapp/bundle/main.js
exit 0
Conveniently, it will also append to a log file in ~/.forever which will show any errors encountered while running your app. You can get the location of the log file and other stats about your app with:
$ forever list
To get your app to start on startup, you'd need to do something appropriate for your flavor of linux. You can maybe just put the start script in /etc/rc.local. For ubuntu see this question.
Also note you really should be bundling your app if using it in production. See this comparison for more details on the differences.