I have registered a domain name, and purchased a 'Level 1' VPS hosting from HostGator (with pre-installed CentOS 5.5), but you can try this on a virtual machine running on your desktop as well.
1. Let's start from installing node.js:
# Download the source package: wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.2.5.tar.gz # Build & Install: tar -zxf node-v0.2.5.tar.gz cd node-v0.2.5 ./configure make sudo make install
2. Now, we need to install a package manager for node.js:
# It's recommended to run npm from a regular user, so we just make the /usr/local/ directory writable by the group 'wheel', and add the relevant user to this group:
sudo chgrp -R wheel /usr/local/{share/man,bin,lib/node}
sudo usermod -g -G wheel $USER
# Install npm:
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
3. As developer of node.js himself states, node.js isn't production ready yet. What he suggests is running node.js behind a reverse proxy, served by nginx, for example.
a) Installing nginx is very easy on CentOS:
# Add EPEL repository: rpm -i http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm # Install 'nginx': yum install nginx
b) Let's configure nginx proxy:
# First, comment out the server {...} section in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:
vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
# Second, add the proxy configuration to /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf (we suppose that your node.js application will be running on port 8000):
cat <<EOF >> /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf
upstream app_cluster_1 {
server 127.0.0.1:8000;
}
server {
listen 0.0.0.0:80;
server_name node.local node;
access_log /var/log/nginx/node.log;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
proxy_pass http://app_cluster_1/;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
EOF
4. Create your simple Web application:
a) We will use ExpressJS as a Web framework, so we need to install it first:
npm install express
b) Let's install templates engine as well. I've tried to use Haml template engine, but I couldn't make it render pages properly, so I was forced to move to using ejs (and I don't regret that):
npm install ejs
c) Create the application folders:
mkdir /var/www/apps/your_app # Static content will be placed here: mkdir /var/www/apps/your_app/static # Views (templates) folder: mkdir /var/www/apps/your_app/views
Here are files that we are going to create under these folders:
/var/www/apps/your_app/app.js
var sys = require('sys');
var express = require('express');
var app = express.createServer();
app.configure(function(){
app.use(express.methodOverride());
app.use(express.bodyDecoder());
app.use(app.router);
app.use(express.staticProvider(__dirname + '/static'));
app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
//app.use(express.errorHandler({ dumpExceptions: true, showStack: true }));
});
var site_locals = {
copyright: 'Copyright @ Michael Spector 2010',
};
app.get('/', function(req, res){
res.render('hello.ejs', {
locals: { site: site_locals },
});
});
app.listen(8000);
/var/www/apps/your_app/views/layout.ejs
<html>
<head>
<title>My App</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<!-- Pay an attention to this special construct that will be replaced with the actual view contents (hello.ejs in our case): -->
<%- body %>
<hr/>
<%= site.copyright %>
</body>
</html>
/var/www/apps/your_app/views/hello.ejs
<h1>Hello, World!<h1/>
/var/www/apps/your_app/static/style.css
body {
text-align: center;
}
5. The last this is making sure that if node.js unexpectedly dies, it will be started again automatically. For this purpose we will install monit:
# Install monit:
yum install monit
# Uncomment "set httpd" entires in the main configuration file:
vim /etc/monit.conf
# Create the configuration file for your application (note that we define NODE_ENV=production variable prior running node.js, which should enable all production features, like caching, etc...):
cat <<EOF > /etc/monit.d/your_app
check host objdump with address 127.0.0.1
start program = "/bin/sh -c 'NODE_ENV=production /usr/local/bin/node /var/www/apps/your_app/app.js'"
as uid nobody and gid nobody
stop program = "/usr/bin/pkill -f 'node /var/www/apps/your_app/app.js'"
if failed port 8000 protocol HTTP
request /
with timeout 10 seconds
then restart
EOF
6. Finally, configure all services to start automatically when system boots, and start them:
sudo chkconfig nginx on sudo chkconfig monit on /etc/init.d/nginx restart /etc/init.d/monit restart monit stop your_app monit start your_app
If you need to restart your application upon re-deployment, run:
monit restart your_app
Go to http://<your-ip>/, and have fun!
Hope this tutorial helps you.
