Lets say you've built $BUILD_IMAGE container image at the build step. I did it on a NodeJS based project but it will work with other technology as well.

check-openapi-contract:
  stage: test
  retry: 1
  timeout: 15m
  script:
    - docker run --name=my-container -d -i -p 8080:8080 --rm $BUILD_IMAGE npm start
    - bash -c 'while [[ "$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w ''%{http_code}'' localhost:8080/swagger.json)" != "200" ]]; do sleep 5; done'
    - docker exec -i my-container curl http://localhost:8080/swagger.json -o ./swagger.json
    - docker exec -i my-container npx swagger-cli validate ./swagger.json

So what do we do? We start the server, then retrieve the swagger.json or openapi.json and leverage swagger-cli validate command to ensure our definition is valid and be notified if it is not. Nothing. More.

For Image-Charts, Redsmin and the-to-be-announced-next-SaaS I use Jenkins as the continuous integration system. Lately I discovered that 75% of Image-Charts project build time was related to the dependencies installation part.
I don't like and do not advise to enable caching at the build level because it inherently breaks the principle of repeatable and independent builds thus for every project I work on each build starts with a clean empty cache.

So I wondered how long Image-Charts build would take if we were to replace npm with yarn for the dependencies installation part.

For a medium-sized project like Image-Charts (39 dependencies and 9 dev-dependencies and some native dependencies) switching the installation step to yarn reduced the build time by up to 37% which is really awesome! The next pain point to improve would be a switch from mocha to ava in order to leverage parallel tests execution but that's another story!

Note: PM2 own code quality is bad and cluster_mode is not production ready. I would not recommend to use PM2, anywhere. You have been warned.

How to use a different ssh port for PM2

Since pm2-deploy directly forward the host string to ssh, you can simply use:

inside the configuration file.

How to use cluster_mode in PM2

Make your app instances listen on port 8000 and pm2 will load-balance any request on 8080 to your app instances.

Troubleshooting pm2 deploy

pm2-deploy outputs its log into /tmp/pm2-deploy.log so if you don't understand why pm2 deploy is not working, a tail -f /tmp/pm2-deploy.log might help.

Chapter 1 Introduction to MEAN

Chapter 2 - Getting Started with NodeJS

Chapter 3 - Building an Express Web App

Chapter 4 - Introduction to Mongodb

Chapter 5 - Introduction to Mongoose

Chapter 6 - Managing User Auth Using Passport

Chapter 7 - Introduction AngularJS

Chapter 8 - Creating a MEAN CRUD Module

Chapter 9 - Adding Real-time func. Using Socket.io

Chapter 10 - Testing MEAN apps

Chapter 11 - Automating & Debugging MEAN Apps

Conclusion

Each time I start a new project/mvp/poc/module I don't want to create/edit a new make/grunt/gulp file or whatever hype dev use these days. I want an already packed CLI with good defaults (mine) that I can drop into my continuous build/integration process. Let's build that once and for all.
– 10/19/2014

check-build leverage jshint, jscs, jsinspect, buddyjs and nsp, to enforce DRYness, coherent coding-style, prevent errors and automatically check security issues.

check-build will be gradually integrated into all our projects at Bringr, Redsmin, UserAPI and the soon to be announced Spid project.

Now let's see what scripts the JavaScript/NodeJS community will build!

Sometimes Google Chrome throw a Could not decode a text frame as UTF-8 error. It happens when the server send invalid unicode characters (see Unicode surrogates) to the browser (via websockets or any other transport) and . I've found two work-around for this issue.

The first one is from my point of view, the best approach (the original code came from SockJS codebase). It removes all the invalid unicode characters from the string so you can send it from the server-side without further decoding.

/*
 * Fix the "Could not decode a text frame as UTF-8." bug #socket.io #nodejs #websocket
 *
 * Usage:
 *   cleanedString = filterUnicode(maybeHarmfulString);
 *
 * Original work-around from SockJS: https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-node/commit/e0e7113f0f8bd8e5fea25e1eb2a8b1fe1413da2c
 * Other work-around: https://gist.github.com/2024272
 * 
 */

var escapable = /[\x00-\x1f\ud800-\udfff\u200c-\u200f\u2028-\u202f\u2060-\u206f\ufff0-\uffff]/g;

function filterUnicode(quoted){

  escapable.lastIndex = 0;
  if( !escapable.test(quoted)) return quoted;

  return quoted.replace( escapable, function(a){
    return '';
  });
}

The second one takes another approach which seems valid (I only tested the former) but requires an extra decoding step on the other side:

/**
 * encode to handle invalid UTF
 * 
 * If Chrome tells you "Could not decode a text frame as UTF-8" when you try sending
 * data from nodejs, try using these functions to encode/decode your JSON objects.
 * 
 * see discussion here: http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=761#c8
 * see also, for browsers that don't have native JSON: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js
 * 
 * Any time you need to send data between client and server (or vice versa), encode before sending,
 * and decode upon receiving. This is useful, for example, if you are using socket.io for real-time
 * client/server communication of data fetched from a third-party service like Twitter, which might
 * contain Emoji, or other UTF characters outside the BMP.
 */
function strencode( data ) {
  return unescape( encodeURIComponent( JSON.stringify( data ) ) );
}

function strdecode( data ) {
  return JSON.parse( decodeURIComponent( escape ( data ) ) );
}

Hope this help !

[Update] Dougal Campbell made some important notes: “the second method preserves the original data, while the first strips out information, altering the original data”. Thus, the first method can lead to potential security leaks (see his comment).

• 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:

• API Notification (chromium)
• Web Notifications (W3C)