How To Use PM2 to Setup a Node.js Production Environment On An Ubuntu VPS

What does the “usermod -aG sudo &ltusername>” command do as I’m getting a error: bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline’

Thanks

@sharry: There’s a typo – I’ve updated it. Try now.

@sharry. This command will add the user to the group of users who are allowed to use sudo to run root commands. The ‘a’ is important because it appends the group to the list of groups your user belongs to - otherwise, your user would l lose membership in other groups.

@Jim thanks for explanation.

Very nice tutorial, thanks for this!

PS: The links to the Git book and pm2 repository both have a comma at the end of the url causing 404 errors

When I input the following

 sudo npm install pm2 -g

I get an error message

npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/configurable/0.0.1

npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/escape-regexp/0.0.1 npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/bindings

usage@0.3.9 install /usr/local/lib/node_modules/pm2/node_modules/usage node-gyp rebuild

gyp WARN EACCES user “root” does not have permission to access the dev dir “/home/nodeuser/.node-gyp/0.10.24” gyp WARN EACCES attempting to reinstall using temporary dev dir “/home/nodeuser/tmp/.node-gyp”

How do I preceed from here?

Hi - those look like warnings, not errors. You can see in the last line that the script attempts to reinstall using the temporary dev dir.

I installed pm2 on my droplet to see if I saw the same thing you did - I did. The good news it that the install succeeded despite the warnings.

One way to find out if the install went well even with warnings is to go to the command line and type pm2. If you see a help screen - you are good to go! I am pretty sure you will find that all is well.

Please find below the output from a successful instead - you will notice the same warnings. Good luck, my friend.

gyp WARN EACCES user “root” does not have permission to access the dev dir “/root/.node-gyp/0.10.24” gyp WARN EACCES attempting to reinstall using temporary dev dir “/usr/lib/node_modules/pm2/node_modules/usage/.node-gyp” gyp http GET http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.24/node-v0.10.24.tar.gz gyp http 200 http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.24/node-v0.10.24.tar.gz make: Entering directory /usr/lib/node_modules/pm2/node_modules/usage/build' CXX(target) Release/obj.target/sysinfo/src/binding.o SOLINK_MODULE(target) Release/obj.target/sysinfo.node SOLINK_MODULE(target) Release/obj.target/sysinfo.node: Finished COPY Release/sysinfo.node make: Leaving directory /usr/lib/node_modules/pm2/node_modules/usage/build’ npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/keypress npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/keypress /usr/bin/pm2 -> /usr/lib/node_modules/pm2/bin/pm2 pm2@0.7.1 /usr/lib/node_modules/pm2 ├── debug@0.7.4 ├── commander@2.1.0 ├── eventemitter2@0.4.13 ├── pm2-interface@0.1.0 ├── watch@0.8.0 ├── colors@0.6.2 ├── cron@1.0.1 ├── async@0.2.9 ├── cli-table@0.2.0 (colors@0.3.0) ├── axon@1.0.0 (escape-regexp@0.0.1, configurable@0.0.1) ├── pm2-multimeter@0.1.2 (charm@0.1.2) ├── coffee-script@1.6.3 ├── axon-rpc@0.0.2 (commander@1.0.5) └── usage@0.3.9 (bindings@1.1.1)

Sorry - I investigated further to see what the problem might be with sudo npm install pm2 -g. I often double check - I started from a fresh Droplet. I did find a problem.

The key is to remove /home/nodeuser/tmp and recreate it. Then try sudo npm install pm2 -g again. That worked for me. Don’t know why this happens. Good luck.

removing /home/noduser/tmp and recreating it worked a charm! :) Thanks a million!

Hi On running the command sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup

I am requested to supply a ‘platform’ argument

(error: missing required argument `platform’)

What would that be? Thanks

Hi After this sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup -u safeuser i have error: error: missing required argument `platform’

What would that be?

Thanks

*** UPDATED

• Sorry i did not see the Question above… But i have the same issue.

Check out <a href=“https://github.com/Unitech/pm2#a8”>https://github.com/Unitech/pm2#a8</a>, pm2 was recently updated to support more OSes.

Since Ubuntu and Debian share so much, I’m setup testing this on Debian 7, 64 bit and am having persistent errors:

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/node

Failed to set capabilities on file `/usr/local/bin/node’ (No such file or directory)

Just to see, next I created a directory called node and ran it again getting a slightly different error:

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/node Failed to set capabilities on file `/usr/local/bin/node’ (Invalid argument) The value of the capability argument is not permitted for a file. Or the file is not a regular (non-symlink) file

Hi David. Try typing ‘whereis node’ at the commandline. This will tell you where node is installed. Try that path. Good luck.

Hi All –

Thanks Jim, I’ll look into it.

For everyone having an issue with this: sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup -u safeuser

you need to add your linux platform Distro name that they support - Look below for my sample

sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u safeuser

Just substitute your Linux Distro for what they support

ubuntu works for Debian7.x Wheezy and created the scripts without error.

A little work and its running the clustered services and managing them without issue. I did build a custom .json file to allow me to pass args to my script. And pm2 has a demo script to show you.

$ pm2 generate <CHOOSE-NAME>.json

Here is my sample: name.json

[{ “name” : "NODE SAMPLE json ", “script” : “SCRIPTNAME.js”, “args” : “[‘–production’ ,‘–loglevel’, ‘{0,1,2}’,‘–standalone’, ‘webserver’]” }]

from the command line I run:

$ pm2 start -i 3 NAME.json

This enables me to use the 8 cpu’s on my machine - 3 for the node app, 3 for another and 2 for admin access and system reporting.

Again thanks to Jim and everyone else for the comments which sparked a day of learning.

Thanks for the tutorial Kamal!

@David: Glad I was able to help! BTW—I didn’t write the article, Jim did :]

When I install the PM2 I have got the following errors please help:

usage@0.3.9 install /root/local/lib/node_modules/pm2/node_modules/usage node-gyp rebuild

sh: 1: node-gyp: Permission denied npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/escape-regexp/0.0.1 npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/mkdirp npm ERR! usage@0.3.9 install: node-gyp rebuild npm ERR! Exit status 127 npm ERR! npm ERR! Failed at the usage@0.3.9 install script. npm ERR! This is most likely a problem with the usage package, npm ERR! not with npm itself. npm ERR! Tell the author that this fails on your system: npm ERR! node-gyp rebuild npm ERR! You can get their info via: npm ERR! npm owner ls usage npm ERR! There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! System Linux 3.11.0-12-generic npm ERR! command “/root/local/bin/node” “/root/local/bin/npm” “install” “pm2” “-g” npm ERR! cwd /root npm ERR! node -v v0.10.26 npm ERR! npm -v 1.4.3 npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/colors/-/colors-0.3.0.tgz npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/keypress npm ERR! npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in: npm ERR! /root/npm-debug.log npm ERR! not ok code 0

Installing using node v0.11.12 causes an error when running pm2 commands. The error is as follows:

onizer: …/deps/uv/src/unix/core.c:431: uv__close: Assertion `fd > -1’ failed.

@waygee: Try installing 0.11.11 or 0.11.13, does that work?

Thanks for the tutorial. I’m using the MEAN stack image and a couple steps didn’t work for me.

Instead of sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/node

I had to do sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/bin/nodejs

Also instead of sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup -u safeuser

I had to do sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u safeuser

Setting up the startup also didn’t work for me the first time but after I rebooted my droplet and manually restarted my node server subsequent reboots automatically restarted my node server.

When I run sudo make install and try to check if node is installed afterwards with node -v, I dont get any feedback form the terminal about it being installed or not. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Great article, Jim. Just to note that, certainly in the current Ubuntu LTS 14.04, you can skip the whole build thing and just run

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

with the bonus that it’s always up to date.

This will probably solve @aristides problem too :)

Hi, I got this message when run pm2 my app.

Express app started on port 80 Error: bind EACCES

Please help me to solve this. Thanks

Regards

@Jonathan

I believe the reason why building Node.JS (and NPM) from source may be preferred is to guarantee an up-to-date version. The package system used by Ubuntu (and other package systems) rely on the package system maintainers updating the packages when they discover there is a new version ready and create a package designed to work on all deployments of that OS; this can be quite delayed from the actual release schedule of a project.

@Jim Great article, the port 80 trick is very handy!

One point on security though, sudo should never be used to install global packages as emphasised by the NPM maintainer Issac Schlueter (http://howtonode.org/introduction-to-npm):

“I strongly encourage you not to do package management with sudo! Packages can run arbitrary scripts, which makes sudoing a package manager command as safe as a chainsaw haircut. Sure, it’s fast and definitely going to cut through any obstacles, but you might actually want that obstacle to stay there.”

safeuser shouldn’t have sudo access at all in this tutorial. Node, git and port 80 should all be provisioned by root, then safeuser could simply configure global npm installs to their home directory using this script I wrote: https://github.com/johnbrett/safe-npm-global meaning they would never need sudo access, making everything much more secure.

Be careful: installing pm2 globally as root will give any user of the system the ability to run anything through pm2 start X as root.

See this github issue for more information #329

@double.ypsilon: That only applies if you’re starting pm2 as root. In this article, pm2 is started as “safeuser” and not root.

You are right johnbrett7 - I have subsequently mended my ways. Mea culpa.

Thanks for the kind words.

Port 80 still shows as in use

Thanks for the tutorial. I’m using the MEAN stack image and a couple steps didn’t work for me.

Instead of sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/node

I had to do sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/bin/nodejs

Also instead of sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup -u safeuser

I had to do sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u safeuser

Setting up the startup also didn’t work for me the first time but after I rebooted my droplet and manually restarted my node server subsequent reboots automatically restarted my node server.

When I run sudo make install and try to check if node is installed afterwards with node -v, I dont get any feedback form the terminal about it being installed or not. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Great article, Jim. Just to note that, certainly in the current Ubuntu LTS 14.04, you can skip the whole build thing and just run

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

with the bonus that it’s always up to date.

This will probably solve @aristides problem too :)

Hi, I got this message when run pm2 my app.

Express app started on port 80 Error: bind EACCES

Please help me to solve this. Thanks

Regards

@Jonathan

I believe the reason why building Node.JS (and NPM) from source may be preferred is to guarantee an up-to-date version. The package system used by Ubuntu (and other package systems) rely on the package system maintainers updating the packages when they discover there is a new version ready and create a package designed to work on all deployments of that OS; this can be quite delayed from the actual release schedule of a project.

@Jim Great article, the port 80 trick is very handy!

One point on security though, sudo should never be used to install global packages as emphasised by the NPM maintainer Issac Schlueter (http://howtonode.org/introduction-to-npm):

“I strongly encourage you not to do package management with sudo! Packages can run arbitrary scripts, which makes sudoing a package manager command as safe as a chainsaw haircut. Sure, it’s fast and definitely going to cut through any obstacles, but you might actually want that obstacle to stay there.”

safeuser shouldn’t have sudo access at all in this tutorial. Node, git and port 80 should all be provisioned by root, then safeuser could simply configure global npm installs to their home directory using this script I wrote: https://github.com/johnbrett/safe-npm-global meaning they would never need sudo access, making everything much more secure.

Be careful: installing pm2 globally as root will give any user of the system the ability to run anything through pm2 start X as root.

See this github issue for more information #329

@double.ypsilon: That only applies if you’re starting pm2 as root. In this article, pm2 is started as “safeuser” and not root.

You are right johnbrett7 - I have subsequently mended my ways. Mea culpa.

Thanks for the kind words.

Port 80 still shows as in use

@cs: Then find out what’s using it :)

sudo fuser -n tcp 80
# or
sudo netstat -plutn | grep 80

would it be a good idea to run pm2/nodejs using the safeuser on a 3000+ port and have nginx (run as root) forward to it? or would it not make much of a difference?

@ray.hwang: Yes. Running your app on a port that is >1024 lets you run it as any user you want other than root which is more secure. You can also use nginx to serve static files as it is most likely faster than your node application at doing so.

Hi folks, First of all, thanks for a great tutorial. Unfortunately I’m getting the following error when trying to install pm2 with ‘sudo npm install pm2 -g’, and having a rough time trying to solve it. Do any of you have any suggestions?

npm ERR! pm2@0.10.7 preinstall: `bash ./scripts/preinstall.sh`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the pm2@0.10.7 preinstall script.
npm ERR! This is most likely a problem with the pm2 package,
npm ERR! not with npm itself.
npm ERR! Tell the author that this fails on your system:
npm ERR!     bash ./scripts/preinstall.sh
npm ERR! You can get their info via:
npm ERR!     npm owner ls pm2
npm ERR! There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! System Linux 3.8.0-29-generic
npm ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "pm2" "-g"
npm ERR! cwd /home/backend/main
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.31
npm ERR! npm -v 1.4.23
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/backend/main/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0

In this example, the created app is in user folder. How to start the application if it is under /var/www/ ? My efforts are failing.

“There is a lot more to learn about node, but this tutorial will put you on the right path. To learn more about pm2, visit the pm2 repo”

Broken link to repo.

I got an error “error: missing required argument `platform’” when I ran the following command:

sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup -u safeuser

Googling I found: https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues/311

I just had to add ubuntu to the command as shown below:

sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 startup ubuntu -u safeuser

Hi, thanks for the tutorial.

After execution the command: sudo env PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin pm2 ubuntu startup -u safeuser my application is running as a service. After restart it’s available and is running as safeuser, but it’s not appeared in pm2 list or pm2 monit. Is there any way to monitor application after restart?

Thanks

May you mention the pm2 save command? Just starting apps might not suffice.

It’ll dump the process list, on startup pm2 will call pm2 resurrect, which will reload the previous dumped files.

Thanks!

When I followed these instructions on Ubuntu 14.04.1 pm2 is installed as root user. when I go to my home folder /home/safeuser/ I can see .pm2 folder and it is owned by root

When I reboot the server pm2 does not start because of this line in pm-init.sh

USER=safeuser

If I change that root USER=root then pm2 starts okay but never loads any of the app servers that i saved using

sudo pm2 save

Can some one please help sort this out.

This was a really helpful walk-through for me, a complete newbie to Node.js, to get up and running with this quickly. Thanks, Jim!

What is the difference between running as a user with root privileges and the root user?

How is this more secure? Wouldn’t the safeuser with root privileges be able to do the same as root?

How do I give safe user permission to use port 80 on non-Ubuntu machines like an EC2 Amazon Linux AMI server?

Thanks for the article! I also had to run pm2 save after starting my app to get pm2 to remember what it should run after the server is rebooted. http://pm2.keymetrics.io/docs/usage/startup/

Good stuff, got it working with Ubuntu 15.10 and Node 5.5. However, being pretty new to DevOps, I’m now unclear about the next steps, where to deploy (push) code, etc. I can run the sample app.js from the root of the /home/safeuser/ folder, but shouldn’t we be placing it into a git repo folder, and then running it from something like a www/ folder? I see this article about Git setup https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-automatic-deployment-with-git-with-a-vps but… not sure how to reconcile it with the current safeuser/ folder structure. Should I be creating the var/www/… and var/repo/… folders inside the safeuser/ folder? And how do we re-point pm2 (node) to serve app.js from var/www/myapp.com? Any pointers much appreciated!

I get the following error when I try to run app.js .

events.js:85 throw er; // Unhandled ‘error’ event ^ Error: listen EADDRINUSE at exports._errnoException (util.js:746:11) at Server._listen2 (net.js:1129:14) at listen (net.js:1155:10) at Server.listen (net.js:1240:5) at Object.<anonymous> (/home/alexander/app.js:6:8) at Module._compile (module.js:460:26) at Object.Module._extensions…js (module.js:478:10) at Module.load (module.js:355:32) at Function.Module._load (module.js:310:12) at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:501:10)

i have nginx running perhaps that has something to do with it. any insight would be appreciated. I am a novice.

Hi there, thanks for the tutorial. After executing “sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/node” I receive the following error: "Failed to set capabilities on file `/usr/local/bin/node’ (Invalid argument) The value of the capability argument is not permitted for a file. Or the file is not a regular (non-symlink) file

I love it when Digital ocean tuts don’t work.

if you get this: Failed to set capabilities on file `/usr/local/bin/node’ (Invalid argument) The value of the capability argument is not permitted for a file. Or the file is not a regular (non-symlink) file

try this: http://serverfault.com/questions/665709/allowing-node-js-applications-to-run-on-port-80

Hi @Jim, remember to specify the OS after the pm2 startup or it will fail for non-ubuntu linux

I can’t get the apps to reload automatically (without running pm2 resurrect).

I’ve read that that can happen due to permissions issue (since startup is ran as root and apps as a regular user), but I ran the startup script with the -u parameter, like so:

sudo env PATH=$PATH:/home/.sites/nodeuser/.npm-global/bin pm2 startup -u nodeuser

and they still don’t restore automatically so I have to explicitly run pm2 resurrect.

Also, as you can see, our NPM setup is set up with a custom global location (so a regular user can install packages globally), but I’m not sure if that should be the issue.

Am I missing something?

From the licensing perspective, doesn’t PM2 pose some risks ?

Please change the line from: sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/local/bin/node to: sudo setcap ‘cap_net_bind_service=+ep’ $(readlink -f $(which node))

Easier for newbies, since the first one does not work on Ubuntu 14.04, but the last one does. By the way, a big thank you and congratulations for your excellent guides! 99% of the time they work exactly as they should :)

Great article, thanks!

For anyone struggling with the setcap line, this seemed to work for me (ubuntu 14.04 + nodejs)

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep readlink -f \which node``

Hope that will help you guys.

Hi there,

I have this working but for some reason PM2 creates multiple (3) processes. Is this a problem and why is this happening?

I found pm2 is running the node app multiple times I used htop here is few lines. Using Ubuntu I added memory 3 times but now it going out of budget.

PM2 V5.2.0: GOD Deamon {/root/.pm2} X 10 Times npm run start X 12 Times node ./dist/server.js X 12 times