grunt-node-startup

Generates a unix startup file for your node application.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.5

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-node-startup --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-node-startup');

What this thing do

This is a very simple plugin with one task that generate a startup script for some UNIX environment. It uses a shell template, which completed with your defined values makes a working script that you can use like this:

myapp start
myapp stop
myapp restart
myapp status

Basically it starts your Node.js app, stores the PID in a file and your log in another. If your app crashes, the process stops, but the PID file stays. To relaunch your app, you can use the --force option to delete the PID file.

The "node_startup" task, the only one

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named node_startup to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  node_startup: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    },
  },
});

Options

options.vars

Type: Object Default value: { CONFIG_DIR: ''{{Working directory}}/conf', PORT: 3000, NODE_ENV: 'production', }

An object with all the env vars you want to define before starting your Node.js app

options.app_dir

Type: String Default value: {{Working directory}}

The location of your Node.js app on startup.

options.pid_dir

Type: String Default value: {{Working directory}}/pid

The directory where the pid file will be saved.

options.pid_file

Type: String Default value: {{Your app name}}.pid

The name of the PID file.

options.log_dir

Type: String Default value: {{Working directory}}/log

The directory where the log file will be saved.

options.log_file

Type: String Default value: {{Your app name}}.log

The name of the log file.

options.shebang

Type: String Default value: /bin/sh

The shebang defining which shell will be used to start the script.

Usage Examples

Custom Options

In this example, we change the location of the log file and set the port to 4000. We choose to put the satrup script in the '/etc/init.d' folder.

grunt.initConfig({
  node_startup: {
    options: {
      log_dir: "/var/log/myapp",
      vars: {
          PORT: 4000
      }
    },
    files: [
        {dest: '/etc/init.d'}
    ],
  },
});

Thanks chovy

I used chovy's node-startup script as template for this grunt plugin. You can see the original script here chovy/node-startup

LICENSE

This is not rocket science, do whatever you want with it, I don't care.