@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 @teh_g , 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.

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 ...

https://pastebin.com/HbX7071t

... When I do "systemctl start nodebb" or "service nodebb start" and I look at "journalctl -u nodebb" I get this...

https://pastebin.com/0SNMD3VL

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?