Node.js Forever is not creating Log files

Question

2 nodejs scripts are being handled by forever. The system is using forever v0.11.1 and node v0.10.29

# forever list
info:    Forever processes running
data:        uid  command  script      forever pid   logfile                 uptime        
data:    [0] D34J userdown app/main.js 7441    10950 /root/.forever/D34J.log 0:2:31:45.572 
data:    [1] P0BX userdown app/main.js 11242   11261 /root/.forever/P0BX.log 0:2:20:22.157 
# forever logs 0
error:   undefined
# forever logs 1
error:   undefined

Question: Why are the log files created by forever missing? Restarting the 2 processes still doesn't create any log files...

The directory /root/.forever does not show the log files too!

# ls -la /root/.forever
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jul  4 11:37 .
drwx------ 8 root root 4096 Jul 10 13:24 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  259 Jul 10 19:34 config.json
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul  4 11:37 pids
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 10 17:12 sock

Answer 1

If you start your node process with forever your_script.js and don't specify a log file, forever will write your logs to the terminal (or cmd on Windows). The log file that is shown when you run forever list or forever logs does not reflect reality, since it's not created in that scenario. But if you specify log files, following the options:

-l  LOGFILE      Logs the forever output to LOGFILE
-o  OUTFILE      Logs stdout from child script to OUTFILE
-e  ERRFILE      Logs stderr from child script to ERRFILE

, like forever -l console.log -e error.log your_script.log, they will be created.

If you want forever to automatically create a log file for you, you have to start your script as a daemon, with forever start your_script.js. In this case, you can also specify your log files.

In the docs page you can see all the command line options.

Answer 2

To answer Shreejibawa (since I can't comment yet)...

forever is very sensitive to the order of the arguments. Take a look at their documentation and notice that the options must come before the script.

forever [action] [options] SCRIPT [script-options]

Instead of: forever start bin/www -e logs/error.log -l logs/logs.log

Try: forever start -e /path/to/logs/error.log -l /path/to/logs/logs.log your_script.js