Recently I've got a little piece of hardware (Raspberry Pi 2 Model B) on my desk. Rather than have it sit on its ass all day, I got a little Node.j...
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This is great, thanks! Slightly off topic but do you have any experience with constantly running a Pi as a server 24/7 and any issues that might arise? I was thinking of doing something like this for my local network but was curious if there were any other things I might do to increase stability and lifespan. Again, thanks for the article!
My Pi 2 is running for more than 3 years non stop. It is constantly measuring and saving enviromental data and serving simple page to check that data.
this sounds similar to something i'd like to do. i'd like to use RasbPi + DHT11 Temperature and Humidity Sensor Module and send data to AWS Dynamo DB and then have a React APP displaying that info. could you please tell me more about your project?
Hey. Goal of my project was just to level the thermostats on the first and second floor of the house. So i can be dad and yell "Don't touch the thermostat" :) I have DHT11 also and used Adafruit_DHT python module. Values are written to plain CSV and i used node.js and chart.js to display it. I use raspery for other thing now, but i left daemon running.
Since I started to write this article (one or two weeks back) I didn't unplug it at all. I actually started to test some of my real work on it (more robust APIs, databases, a lot of routes, automatic Postman tests) and never failed me. It uses an unnoticeable part of my home network bandwidth and almost no power at all, so comes in handy to have one around. Unfortunately, I don't know what sort of issues might arise if you use a lot of traffic and I did not monitor the stability. But I will keep you posted in case something goes wrong and maybe I will setup some benchmarking in the following days.
I made a CSS indexer. I used PhantomJS. There was some incidents of PhantomJS sub tasks not exiting which left some tasks hanging.
It depends on what you are doing. For the most part PM2 will cover what you need.
Thanks for this, Bogdan. This was very easy to follow and clear. Although I ran into an issue that caused me to pull out my hair for several hours. I was following your example exactly. Everything was working well up to the point when I tried to make a request to the server from outside the Raspberry Pi. I went the ufw route and allowed port 3000. But my laptop on the same LAN could not get a response from the node server. (The same laptop was connected over SSH on port 22.) Running a port scan showed that only 22 was open. I tried many things including disabling/enabling ufw, rebooting, making ufw default allow, disabling ufw and setting iptables directly to the most permissive and simple set of allow rules, etc. Next on the hit list was the router. I went through all the router settings with a fine tooth comb. No help there.
I'm a web developer so I'm super comfortable with the node stuff, but the networking stuff is a bit out of my comfort zone. So I was sure that's where the problem was. There must be some firewall issue somewhere, right?
No. It turns out it was the node server all along. The example code passes the hostname to
server.listen. So node is only responding to requests with that exact combination of hostname and port. Trying to hit it using a different hostname from outside the Pi failed every time. Once I changed to using the hostname-less listen method then it worked immediately and the port showed as open when running the port scan. The change:It goes to show that sometimes the issue is where you least expect it. I hope this helps someone else if they run into this issue.
Great catch Chris! I spend some time taking a look to the documentation, see if I missed the parameters combination, but it seems indeed that it takes the exact combination of hostname and port.
Interesting to take a look at, I expected if you use the reverse proxy to get trough 127.0.0.1, right?
Yes, I imagine that the reverse proxy would have worked properly since the hostname would match in that scenario. But I followed the "0. Don't use a Reverse Proxy :(" section since I was only making something for use in my LAN. The assertion at the end of that section is "Now you can access from the outside of the world! You can type your device's address followed by the port in your browser." This is not true since using the device's address will not match the hostname. :(
That's right, yeah. Thank you for the heads up, I've edited the code to a more general case
Great article)) Thanks for this nice and useful tutorial)) I've mentioned that in the first step when I install NodeJS I should use
instead of
ditto
this post is awesome. exactly what i needed to get started with RaspPi. I am planning a pet project with RaspPi (and humidity modules) and AWS stack to gather data and store it to DB and then have a React APP to display it from anywhere!
thanx
That's exactly the kind of cool things that you can do with a Pi! Keep me posted.
I install pm2 as instructed, but when I try to pm2 start app.js I get a pm2: command not found error. I see no errors during pm2 installation. I had to add
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/nodejs/lib/node_modules/pm2/bin
to my .bashrc
then source .bashrc
to make it work on npm 6.7.0 / 6.9.0, latest version of raspbian
Thanks for the heads up! Duly noted.
This looks like a fabulous guide. Insta-bookmark.
Nice tutorial! What database can be setup on the pi?
You can setup any database that can be setup on Debian.
oh really? i was trying to setup mongodb on my pi3 once. Ran into some issues. will try again
I have hopefully easy question, I was following this to get node app to run background, but it requires a variable and the whole thing seems to fail when deomonizing it.
I'm trying to pass 'node resources/app/main.js --dataPath=$HOME/foundrydata' through PM2 but it seems to break.
yep, in order to pass node arguments to pm2 you have to use the
--node-argsargument. likeOr you can add it in the pm2 JSON file. You can read more in the tutorial or in the pm2 docs.
Great post! I am wondering tho can i then access this node server from outside the local network, i assume i will have to do some configuration on my router.
Haha, I was thinking the same a few days back. You should be aware that you might not be allowed since the traffic is monitored by your internet provider.
This is the source for further reading. My provider states only The Customer is not permitted to rent the Service to a third party, to sell it or to make it available in any way, unless otherwise agreed. which might not be the case though.
But, yes, I assume that you have to setup a sort of domain name for your public IP or so.
Will definitely investigate further, would be very cool to setup up stuff for personal use. Thanks, keep up the good work 👍👍
Give ZeroTier a look, makes it very easy but still secure.
Thank you for this. I will have to try this out since I have few RasPi waiting to be used for good. Do you have recommendations on ufw rules to make the connection more secure?
I would allow just the traffic from/to the ports that my API is using.
Thank!
btw do i really need the network cable if i have wireless connection??
No, my Pi didn't have wireless connection, therefore I used the cable
Thanks for the tip! Didn't have time before to check SystemD, since PM2 seemed the easiest out of the box way (that also uses SystemD), but will definitely check asap.
Great article, it helped me a lot, but I had a problem, I'm not able to upload files on node.js, on windows and MacOS I can upload files, but on raspberry not work
Great post, thank you very much!
Nginx isn't getting through UFW, I have to either disable UFW completely or allow port 80 which I think defeats the purpose of that section of your tutorial.