My site was there --- and then was gone

a_5mith

I think I'll just delete the droplet again.
ill create a new user -sudo and install it in that directory.

Completely unnecessary. Just fix the errors you are seeing and it will work just fine. There should be no reason your forum is going offline, mine has been up and running since March with no downtime (except for me stopping it to run an update etc).

Cannot read propety buildHeader of undefined is an error with you running a plugin not designed for your version of nodebb. What version of NodeBB are you running? If 0.6.x, you need the latest version of whatever plugin is giving you that error. If you're running 0.5.x, then either update to 0.6.x, or run the version of the plugin before the 0.6.x changes were added.

birch

support at DO told me it was best to destroy the droplet and start over (and suggested my 512 ram would be too small to run Nodebb)
I don't know how to fix the errors because I can't get my forum online to deactivate and uninstall the plugins.
My first install was based on psychobunnies tut that I had found when searching 'installing NodeBB'
that was outdated it seems - and I had a really really hard time installing it.
It was up and running. I was so thrilled. Then the next day I woke up and it was gone. Support was unable to help me and told me to look at NodeBB documentation.
Then above, once finding out that it was outdated info and getting a link to the newer installation - I started over. Much easier this time - but still must have missed soemthing because two hours later it was down. However initially ./nodebb restart worked.
Now it does not. So - droplet destroyed I will try again. I know the docs are simple - but for me it is quite foreign. I was proud of myself for getting ghost running

a_5mith

@birch said:

support at DO told me it was best to destroy the droplet and start over (and suggested my 512 ram would be too small to run Nodebb)

Rubbish. I'm running with 512mb of RAM and have almost 30,000 posts. I can even get Magento running on 512mb droplets even though they "recommend" 2GB.

I don't know how to fix the errors because I can't get my forum online to deactivate and uninstall the plugins.

You don't need it to be online, you can deactivate and uninstall plugins from the terminal.

Then above, once finding out that it was outdated info and getting a link to the newer installation - I started over. Much easier this time - but still must have missed soemthing because two hours later it was down. However initially ./nodebb restart worked.

If the site was down, restarting it would have done nothing. I encourage you to explore ./nodebb logs whenever you have an issue, they tell you literally everything that is wrong.

julian

@a_5mith Actually, I think he was talking about us

@birch I had no clue you had posted here and was in the process of debugging your instance -- the forum here is your best bet at getting everything up and running, and the documentation should provide enough instruction to get everything set up.

What happens when you run ./nodebb restart?

a_5mith

@julian Ahhh, thought he meant DO. Amended for incorrectness.

birch

@a_5mith said:

@julian Ahhh, thought he meant DO. Amended for incorrectness.

I'm a girl ...
Digital Ocean is where I am hosted and yes I was told to just delete and start over and that I needed a bigger droplet size..
,/nodebb restart looks like it was doing something - but it never came back online

Also the first time, when it went offline - i had nothing installed. No plug ins or anything. I simply got it runinng - at about 4am, lol. Went to sleep, got up maybe 4 hours later and it was gone..
This time I put in Forever and a few other things to keep it running -- and as test I did a server restart and everything came back up on it's own . I thought woot! Awesome, Forever Service is auto restarting nodebb Then I played with it a bit, mainly just changed theme (love cucina!) - added mail thingy because I had read that that was the plug in to use-- and it was still fine for another half hour or so then suddenly when i went from one page to another it was gone. restarting it in root didnt work - nothing.
So now it's destroyed and Im wary about trying again because I think it really might be out of my league. Ive used MyBB most of my forum years - really wanted to do something different this time round.

psychobunny

You might have installed a plugin that wasn't compatible, the latest version of NodeBB should prevent this issue if you're installing them via ACP, but if you're installing it via command line there isn't any safeguards.

./nodebb log to see the log, for any crash messages

And destroying the droplet is overkill, you can usually get things running by looking at the crash log and figuring out what's wrong (post the error here)

birch

@psychobunny - the only things i installed this most recent time via command was supervisor and forever. the other was installed via ACP. this installation was done via the docs link offered to me above.

When my site went down the day before, and stayed down for hours - then, I had not installed anything at all, however I had installed using the Installing NodeBB for Dummies.
As for destroying it, I did what was recommended to be via DO support.
I'm not familiar with command lines - i dual boot with linux but rarely use it - so really the whole thing is a huge learning curve for me

a_5mith

@birch said:

I'm a girl ...

My apologies, your username doesn't give that away. I'll message you shortly.

? Offline

@birch said:

I had installed using the Installing NodeBB for Dummies.
...
the whole thing is a huge learning curve for me

It's perfectly fine to be learning as you go. It's one of the best ways to pick up experience, and interact with content to learn exactly what things do.

It appears as if you're using an outdated guide on @psychobunny's blog. While it is designed for installing at Digital Ocean, it was written for an old version of the platform, and it only installs using Ubuntu. f you're setting up an Ubuntu droplet, I must insist that you ignore everything written in the NodeBB for Dummies guide, and take a look at the specific installation instructions for installing NodeBB on Ubuntu.

While the guide does an excellent job of going in-depth, the OS-specific installation instructions are what you'll need to set up a new forum/droplet.

With that being said, there's a few tips for working with NodeBB as a beginner. When installing plugins or using npm from the command-line, you will lines that begin with WARN, as you have already noticed. These are usually harmless, and can often be ignored. However as you've since discovered when something says ERROR you've got a problem

It looks like you've gotten some misinformation from your friend. There's no need to install PM2, or forever. Previously, there was a need as the NodeBB loader wouldn't restart the software if it went offline. With the recent versions (0.5.x or 0.6.x, I can't remember) NodeBB has the ability to restart itself when necessary. However, this doesn't mean it will detect an issue and attempt to correct it, it simply restarts NodeBB and the forum comes back up - unless there's a configuration error which prevents a component from functioning. It appears as if you've encountered this already.

When starting NodeBB, there's a few commands you can use.

./nodebb start
- Starts your forum in "production". If you go down, it'll restart itself.
./nodebb stop
- If NodeBB is running, this takes your forum offline.
./nodebb log
- This can only be ran after ./nodebb start. This shows what's going on in your terminal.
./nodebb dev
- Starts NodeBB in "development". This basically combines ./nodebb start and ./nodebb log.
- The forum only stays online as long as the dev command is operational. If you hit ctrl+c to end the console output, you also power off the forum.
- This is great for doing a quick test, and seeing what happens as you make changes.
./nodebb restart
- Restarts your forum. Pretty explanatory
./nodebb reset has a few uses.
- ./nodebb reset plugins
  - Resets all plugins to their default settings
- ./nodebb reset plugin="nodebb-plugin-brokenplugin"
  - Resets a single plguin to it's default setting
- ./nodebb reset widgets
  - Resets widgets. Items are moved to the draft zone. (Not deleted, just disabled)
- ./nodebb reset themes
  - Resets themes. Undoes alterations (I think - could be wrong on this) and reverts it to the original items.
- ./nodebb reset all
  - Resets all of the above.

Now that you're familiar with these commands, working with NodeBB in the command-line should be a little simpler. In order to work with NodeBB using these commands, you will have to have navigated to the folder where you installed NodeBB.

I've noticed that you're trying to use a password with redis, but there's not a redis password required. In order to use a redis password, you need to edit your redis configuration to requirepass. You could do this through the terminal, but if you're new to working with a VPS I'd just recommend downloading the config through SFTP, editing it, reuploading it to overwrite the original file, and then restarting the redis-server service.

Let's have a quick chat about installing plugins. Since you're new to NodeBB, until we can get you up and running for at least one week straight, I'm going to have to ask that you do not install a plugin using npm install nodebb-plugin-pluginname or npm i nodebb-plugin-pluginname

You can install NodeBB plugins (and edit their configuration) in the Admin panel.

So for now, you've got an issue with nodebb-plugin-emailer-mandrill

As stated, you need to run ./nodebb reset nodebb-plugin-emailer-mandrilland then ./nodebb start

If you want to start fresh, I'm working on a blog post that's updated and may be able to help.