I saw today a question on StackOverflow about "Running and managing nodejs applications on a single server" and thought it would be a good idea to share how we deal with NodeJS applications at brin.gr.

• First we use supervisord to manage & automatically restart applications. The configuration file for each application looks like this:

• Then each application embeds the following code snippet (already presented here). (In fact we require a module pid which do exactly the same).

• Finally, for remote control and application monitoring, we've setup Monit. Each application has a monit configuration file like the following:

Note: before this current workflow we were using forever/forever webui but forever remained quite unstable so we decided to switch to supervisord/monit and since this migration everything's fine.

I released three library/tool/cli this last months: Forever-WebUI, Node-amqp-dsl & Node-amqp-tool.

Let's start with Forever-WebUI. I use forever at Brin.gr for managing node processes but I've always found the workflow slow when wanting to restart multiple scripts. So I developed a web interface that lists all running scripts and allow the user to browse logs, restart or stop scripts.

npm install forever-webui && node node_modules/forever-webui/app.js
Note: if someone here knows how to update a backbone collection's view without having to remove the entire list and adding again one by one each view feel free to enlight me ;)

Next Node-AMQP-dsl & Node-AMQP-tool: Brin.gr rely heavily on RabbitMQ and as usual when using the same tool everyday the little annoying things quickly become a nightmare. So AMQP-dsl is a fluent interface for node-AMQP (more examples on Github) ...


And AMQP-tool is a simple CLI to easily import & export AMQP queue. For example, exporting 5000 messages from a queue into a file is easy as:

amqp-tool --host rabbitmq.local -u user -p azerty -q queuetest --count 5000 --export > dump.json