Foreverize: in Soviet Russia, your server keeps itself up

Foreverize is a handy tool that makes it really easy to your server code to incorporate forever-monitor automatically.

This version (0.1.x) should be usable, but consider it alpha. Not all use cases have been tested.

Wish list:

1. zero-downtime restarts

Install

$ npm install foreverize

Quick Start

Install required dependencies (or through package.json)

(Installing forever directly is only necessary if you want to use the forever commandline tool to manage your foreverized process)

$ npm install forever
$ npm install foreverize

In your server.js

var start_server = function(){
  require("http").createServer().listen(1337);
}

var foreverize = require("foreverize")();
if(!foreverize.isMaster){
  start_server();
}

Run it

$ node server.js

Now if your HTTP server crashes (anything started in run_server()), it'll respawn itself. You can also use the normal forever commands to manage the process.

$ node_modules/.bin/forever list
info:    Forever processes running
data:        uid                command                        script                                          forever pid   logfile                                               uptime     
data:    [0] foreverize_example /usr/local/nvm/v0.8.8/bin/node /home/ilya/work/cm/foreverize_example/server.js 26326   26329 /home/ilya/work/cm/foreverize_example/log/forever.log 0:0:0:5.61    

Configuration

By default, foreverize will look for a config file in the following places:

./config/foreverize.json
./foreverize.json

It's also possible to specify the config file at the commandline

node server.js --foreverize-config /path/to/config.json

The configuration file is optional. If specified, it MUST be valid JSON (double quotes, no comments, etc.). Most of the options are passed directly to forever-monitor, but there are a few special cases and defaults.

{
  // A shortcut for specifying a log directory relative to your server file.
  // If it doesn't exist, it will be created.
  // outFile (stdout) will get set to #{logDir}/out.log
  // errFile (stderr) will get set to #{logDir}/out.err
  'logDir': 'log/path',

  // appends to your log files instead of overwriting them
  'append': true
}

Additional options can also be passed in from your code (and take precedence over default and config file)

var foreverize = require("foreverize")({
  logDir: "log"
});

Usage

It is recommened to set the uid configuration option in your app. This way, foreverize will make sure that only one instance of your app is running at a time. This is particularly important if you use cluster as cluster will happily (and silently) run your server on a random port if your desired port is already in use.

Make that you minimize the code that executes outside the if(foreverize.isMaster) check. If your app crashes here, foreverize won't be able to start.

Contributing

I welcome pull requests!

License

This software is distributed under the MIT License.