This tutorial will get you through starting your OpenShift application. This document assumes you are on a mac or a any other unix based system.
We will be installing ExpressJS 3.0 on a NodeJs application.
Create your app
make sure you you add express@3.0 and ejs to your global node_module_list file that openshift creates for you.
make sure you use __dirname to call the node_module/express module.
NodeJS’s blazing fast performance is gaining popularity very fast. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes the de facto development platform. Interest in NodeJS is far out stripping the supply-demand chain of shared hosting providers. Therefore, people like our selves should turn to Virtual Environment servers to get things done from scratch, rather than having to rely on providers to play catch up.
NodeJS is strengthening the relationship between the physical and the digital in social development. From Arduino projects to iPhone applications; it’s currently being used by IBM, Facebook, Foursquare and by many more projects found in this list of companies. Node.js is well-suited for building solutions that require real-time, synchronous interaction.
I’ve written a tutorial into getting NodeJS installed on a brand new server from scratch. We will be using Debian 6 and Nginx as the web server on a 512MB RAM virtual environment. Also, we’ll want to install a database to get you ready, I’ve chosen MongoDB.
To get started we need to purchase a web server. I have Mediatemple’s (ve) 512MB with Debian 6.0 Squeeze. I highly recommend them to any other hosting company. Go ahead and purchase your (ve) server. I also highly recommend you work on a MAC!! Since it’s UNIX based, and every cool programmer has one now anyway, so best to get one and strengthen the community.
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Presuming you have your server, installed Debian 6 and have your root access credentials ready, we can begin.
SSH into your server as root. Change the below zeros to your’ servers IP address.
ssh root@00.00.00.00
Once you’ve gone through the initial instructions. Go ahead and update, upgrade you’re server.
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
Make sure you have you’re locale settings corrected for your Debian system.
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
Select your’ locale, by entering the below command. There should be en_US.UTF-8, select that and press enter.
dpkg-reconfigure locales
Remember we won’t be needing Apache, MySQL or PHP so we won’t install them, since they’re total resource whores. Let’s get curl installed, by entering the following command.
apt-get install curl
You may need a means of accessing your files via FTP. So go ahead and install VSFTPD.
apt-get install vsftpd
You can use your root username and password to FTP into your server with SFTP, port 22.
Now for this very important command, which installs NodeJS, Nginx, and the pre-requisites to get started.
apt-get install vim-nox nginx unzip g++ screen libssl-dev git-core
You’ll have to go through all the instruction given during the installation. After installation has finished, you can install NodeJS, with the following command. Make sure your /root/ directory when entering the below command.
git clone git://github.com/ry/node.git
Then build it.
./configure make make install
That process will take a very long time, mostly because it is compiling Google’s V8 engine from source, which plays a big part of NodeJs. Let it work, and then install NPM (Node Package Manager).
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
Now let’s create a file named /usr/bin/php-fastcgi with the following command.
nano /usr/bin/php-fastcgi
Add the following contents.
#!/bin/bash FASTCGI_USER=www-data FASTCGI_GROUP=www-data SOCKET=/var/run/php-fastcgi/php-fastcgi.socket PIDFILE=/var/run/php-fastcgi/php-fastcgi.pid CHILDREN=6 PHP5=/usr/bin/php5-cgi /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -s $SOCKET -P $PIDFILE -C $CHILDREN -u $FASTCGI_USER -g $FASTCGI_GROUP -f $PHP5
Save and exit that file, and now let’s make it executable.
chmod +x /usr/bin/php-fastcgi
Now let’s create a file named php-fastcgi in /etc/init.d/ with the following command.
nano /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
And add the following content to that file, then save and exit.
#!/bin/bash
PHP_SCRIPT=/usr/bin/php-fastcgi
FASTCGI_USER=www-data
FASTCGI_GROUP=www-data
PID_DIR=/var/run/php-fastcgi
PID_FILE=/var/run/php-fastcgi/php-fastcgi.pid
RET_VAL=0
case "$1" in
start)
if [[ ! -d $PID_DIR ]]
then
mkdir $PID_DIR
chown $FASTCGI_USER:$FASTCGI_GROUP $PID_DIR
chmod 0770 $PID_DIR
fi
if [[ -r $PID_FILE ]]
then
echo "php-fastcgi already running with PID `cat $PID_FILE`"
RET_VAL=1
else
$PHP_SCRIPT
RET_VAL=$?
fi
;;
stop)
if [[ -r $PID_FILE ]]
then
kill `cat $PID_FILE`
rm $PID_FILE
RET_VAL=$?
else
echo "Could not find PID file $PID_FILE"
RET_VAL=1
fi
;;
restart)
if [[ -r $PID_FILE ]]
then
kill `cat $PID_FILE`
rm $PID_FILE
RET_VAL=$?
else
echo "Could not find PID file $PID_FILE"
fi
$PHP_SCRIPT
RET_VAL=$?
;;
status)
if [[ -r $PID_FILE ]]
then
echo "php-fastcgi running with PID `cat $PID_FILE`"
RET_VAL=$?
else
echo "Could not find PID file $PID_FILE, php-fastcgi does not appear to be running"
fi
;;
*)
echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart|status}"
RET_VAL=1
;;
esac
exit $RET_VAL
Start php-fastcgi and nginx by issuing the following commands.
chmod +x /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi update-rc.d php-fastcgi defaults /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start /etc/init.d/nginx start
Let’s make your website’s directory ready. You’ll need to make a directory for it in /var/www/example.com/ be sure to change example.com with your website address anywhere in this tutorial. To make that directory, enter the following command.
mkdir /var/www/example.com
Let’s chown that directory.
chown -R www-data:www-data /srv/www/www.example.com
Now let’s get started by writing our first NodeJS app in that directory. Enter the following command, be sure to change example.com with your website.
nano /var/www/example.com/app.js
Type in the following code and save the file by tapping ctrl-o and ctrl-x (these are the nano text editor’s commands). Be sure to change the IP address to your server’s address.
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World!\n');
}).listen(8000, "222.222.222.222");
console.log('This Node app is running on port 8000.');
Now it’s time to configure you’re Nginx web server. You may not need to, but add a line to reference your host on the file. However this may be auto generated with a line to your primary domain name.
nano /etc/hosts
Save and exit that, and now its time to enable our site by adding a virtual host to Nginx. Create the virtual host with the following command.
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
Add the following in that file.
upstream app_example_com {
server 222.222.222.222:8000;
}
server {
listen 216.70.83.122:80;
server_name example.com example.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/examplecom.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_example_com/;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
Let us now enable the site and create a symbolic link to it, using the following commands.
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com example.com
Let’s restart Nginx to test it, with the following command.
/etc/init.d/nginx restart
As you might have gathered, NodeJS only runs once you use the ‘node app.js’ command and will quit as soon as you close the SSH connection. Therefore, we’ll be using forever to keep node child processes running in the background. Do the following command to install Forever globally. The installation takes a while.
npm install forever -g
Start your node application using forever.
forever start /var/www/example.com/app.js
Now you can go to the browser and view example.com even when the SSH connection and the terminal has closed.
Some notable references that may help.
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