Question

Is there a good way to run and manage multiple nodejs apps on a single server?

I’ve been looking at haibu and nodester, but they seem a little complex for what I am trying to do.

I also was looking at forever and I think that may work with the config file and web gui, but I am not sure how I am going to handle passing the port information via ENV or arguments.

Answer 1

I use Supervisord & Monit, more details and configuration example here: Process Management at Bringr.

Moreover you can specify environnement variable directly from the supervisord configuration file (see sub-process environment). But I personally prefer to add these variables directly inside a ~/.bashrc on each machine.

If the port number isn’t going to change for each application (but change between production & development environment). I’ll recommend to specify them inside a config.json (or directly inside package.json). And the config.json will contain a different port number for each application depending on the environnement:

{
 myapp:{
  production:{port:8080},
  development:{port:3000}
 }
}

And inside myapp.js:

 var config = require('./config');
 app.listen(config.myapp[process.env.NODE_ENV].port)

With process.env.NODE_ENV declared in ~/.bashrc.