How to run a docker container with pm2?

I have a system that has many components and one of them is a docker container. I'd like to manage all these components with Pm2.

I'm able to run the Node.js scripts with Pm2, but I have a problem starting the docker container on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.

I have a script "start.sh" that already starts the docker container in the right way.

The script is:

docker run -d -it -p 21083:21083 -p 9001:9001 -v /home/myhome/mqtt_broker/conf/mosquitto.conf:/mosquitto/config/mosquitto.conf -v /home/myhome/mqtt_broker/authentication/auth.txt:/mosquitto/auth.txt -v /home/myhome/mqtt_broker/acl/aclfile.txt:/mosquitto/aclfile.txt eclipse-mosquitto

I'm trying to start this script with PM2 in this way:

pm2 start /home/myhome/mqtt_broker/startBroker.sh --name=BrokerMqtt

After launching this command I can see:

'docker ps' says that the container is up,
BrokerMqtt in the processes list of pm2 with the status 'errored',
in the log of pm2 I can see many of these errors:

docker:

Error response from daemon: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint jolly_meninsky (fefe45df2d338d89a4f8232873779e41bcaa1b846a463bc035d59c5ae09b26e0): Bind for 0.0.0.0:21083 failed: port is already allocated.

Why the script start.sh, that works if launched alone, fails with Pm2?

Solution

You might want to try using pm2 with npm start. In your package.json file, add a start script

  "start": "/home/myhome/mqtt_broker/startBroker.sh && sleep 5 && node Node"

Then you can start your application with

pm2 start npm --name BrokerMqtt -- start

You can adjust the time of sleep, I added that to make sure the container is ready to serve your node program.

Improvements you can make:

give a name to the container
make sure that container is not running before you run your bash script, here's one way to check:

docker inspect container_name|grep Running