Deploying Node.js and Node.js application to Raspberry Pi

Question

I have a Node.js application that I want to run on a Raspberry Pi.

And, I'd like to be able to deploy new version of my application as well as new versions of Node.js to that Raspberry Pi remotely.

Basically, something such as:

$ pi-update 192.168.0.37 [email protected]
$ pi-update 192.168.0.37 my-app@latest

I don't have any preferences on how to transfer my app to the Pi, may it be pushing or pulling. I don't care (although I should add that the code for the application is available from a private GitHub repository).

Additionally, once Node.js and / or my app were deployed, I want the potentially running Node.js app to restart.

How could I do this? Which software should I look into? Is this something that can easily be done using tools from Raspbian, or should I look for 3rd party software (devops tools, such as Chef & co.), or ...?

Any help is greatly appreciated :-)

Answer 1

a) For running the script continuously, you can use tools like forever or pm2, otherwise you can also make the app a debian daemon on raspian you can run with sudo <servicename> start (if you're running Arch Linux, this is handled differently I guess).

b) If your Raspberry is reachable from the internet, you can use a GitHub hook (API Documentation) to run every time you push a change to your repository. This hook is basically a URL endpoint on your Pi that runs a little shell script locally.

This script should shutdown you app gracefully, do a git pull for your repository and start the app/service again. You could also trigger this shell script over SSH from your local machine, e.g. ssh [email protected] /path/to/your/script

A update script could look like this:

# change the 'service' command to your script runner of choice
service <yourapp> stop
cd /path/to/your/app
git pull
service <yourapp> start

c) The problem with remote updating Node itself is, that the official binary builds for Raspberry Pi appear only very irregularly, otherwise it would be easy to just download/update the binaries with wget or curl. So most of the time you either need to cross compile Node on your own machine or spend about two hours to recompile it on your Pi. If you want to go with the unofficial builds on GitHub, you can install them with curl -# -L https://gist.github.com/raw/3245130/v0.10.17/node-v0.10.17-linux-arm-armv6j-vfp-hard.tar.gz | tar xzvf - --strip-components=1 -C /usr/local but you need to check the file name for every release.