So before I begin, I am somewhat new to Ubuntu and this is my first NodeBB install, so I may have missed some basics here.
I have NodeBB installed on Ubuntu 16.04.3 x64. That was relatively easy, works a treat if I use the "./nodebb start" command from the install directory. The part where I am having trouble is I want NodeBB to be fired back up on reboot or failure automatically and I want to use the systemctl commands because it is natively available and because I don't want to further complicate things for myself.
I have a "nodebb.service" file in /etc/systemd/system/ and it is a copy and paste from the NodeBB run up instructions with the user and path/to/nodebb parts set to my environment ...
... When I do "systemctl start nodebb" or "service nodebb start" and I look at "journalctl -u nodebb" I get this...
That is the entire log output for that one "systemctl start nodebb". So you can see it launches nodeBB and immediately fails, repeats this process a few times and eventually times out / hits some kind of flood limit.
There is nothing in /var/nodebb/logs/output and nothing new in /var/log/syslog that isn't already in the journal linked above.
I honestly don't know for certain if it is a NodeBB problem or my Ubuntu knowledge, I'm leaning towards NodeBB. Can anyone help please?
ok so, I spent a lifetime searching the forums and google tonight to try and solve this same problem.
The docs here
[Unit]
Description=NodeBB forum for Node.js.
Documentation=http://nodebb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
After=system.slice multi-user.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=nodebb
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=nodebb
Environment=NODE_ENV=production
WorkingDirectory=/opt/nodebb
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node loader.js --no-daemon --no-silent
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
This is not my work, it came from here. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/10648/nodebb-service-failing-to-start-after-server-reboot
hope this helps others out. Not sure how to get the docs changed at the above URL.
Duke
Would you mind opening an issue on Github for that?
@julian yes sorry, I did have that originally. I forgot that I started messing with my system start script. It didn't work with what was on the install documents, copied and pasted with my local system variables changed (path to NodeBB etc).
I have just tried @Duke 's script and it works perfectly
, I just updated the "WorkingDirectory" line to point to my NodeBB install. In my case, it was being run by the user "nodebb" so I didn't have to change that.Thank you everyone for the replies.
I've posted something about this on here a while ago:
one important step which I have not seen here is:
systemctl enable nodebb
So for those wondering why it is not starting up after a reboot... this is the cause.
*side-note: Wait a few minutes for it to start up (if mongod/redis is on the same server)
@julian yeah, its in the [unit] field in After= ... just add mongod.service and that should help, but it is not really needed.
It will keep restarting until it is working... if the service has been enabled 
I tested it out a few weeks ago. One server has it, the other doesn't have it and both took the same amount of time, unfortunately. The reason is, mongod will report as started/alive/online... but the other dependencies did not start yet (one way to test, is to stop the mongod service, start it up again and immediately try to access the DB... mongod will report an error for a minute or 2, despite reporting that the service has started)
Described all this in a new ticket to get the docs updated.
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/5924
@duke The "After=" should be in the [unit] field, as you are specifying it to start after specified services. By default (sort of) it is network.service, so that the service will start, only after the network service has started (however, it does not check if there is network connectivity, just if the service has started).
I hope that clarifies things. Maybe one should add that to the docs, as some people will think that the After=network.service, anyotherservice.service will actually checks network connectivity or that the service is working.
