Simple node app deployment with git and forever

Nov 2012 - 1 min read

There are so many different ways to deploy a node app around the internet. Here’s my way. A way I no longer use.

Use git for version control
Install forever – this allows handling of the node process. It’s better than running it in a screen session like most people do!¹
```
sudo npm install -g forever
```
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Allow the git user account (which should be unprivileged) to host on port 80. After following this guide I decided to use setcap:
```
sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin
sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=%2Bep' /usr/local/bin/node
```
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Add a post-receive hook on the remote (bare) repository to check out and restart the node process using forever. For example:

 #!/bin/bash
 export GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/naggie/dspa/
 git checkout -f

 cd $GIT_WORK_TREE

 forever stop dspa-server.js
 forever start dspa-server.js

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That’s it! Simply push to the server to update and restart the node instance.

Also a convention is to use an environment variable to define the port. This is most useful when a proxy is used (for example, to use apache). This is used, for example, to work with the cloud9 ide.

Nowadays I recommend installing a systemd service. ↩︎

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Tags:

nodejs

software

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