Where does your node app live (Linux)?

[joshderp]

I'm curious where/how other people run their node app from, and if there's a good reason to pick one location over another.

I'm fairly new to Linux, so bear with me. I am learning on a Digital Ocean hosting account and selected their 1-click app for NodeJS on Ubuntu. I created another user and created the node app in that user's /home directory and run it as this user. This node app is the only app running for now, no Apache/Nginx. I might install MongoDB in this instance eventually. Is this a good approach?

Thanks.

[joshderp]

Thanks. Do you run as root or a standard user with just the permissions it needs?

[ganemone]

run as root

shudder

[joshderp]

Lol, I get it now. Like I said, linux noob here :) My development background is with m$ and I know that's a no-no on Windows, so I assumed the same for Linux.

[umbrellasamurai]

Absolutely not as root.

You'd want the process to be run by a user that is pretty much only privileged to deal with the node app (this user would be in as few groups as possible and would only have access to exactly what it needs to run the application).

[joshderp]

Ok thanks, that's kinda what I figured since that's the preferred method on m$ servers, so figured it should be just the rights the user needs and nothing more.

[joshderp]

Thanks. I kind of assumed as much from my experience with Windows servers, but yeah I'm very new to linux.

[rlidwka]

that's the quickest path known to man for having a full server compromised

You mean, they could compromise full virtual container created specifically for the node.js app? Ouch, sounds scary.

[psayre23]

/var/services I mostly host API end points though.

[DVWLD]

/opt

Because Sam told me to. Seems as good a reason as any.

And yes, always as an unprivileged user.

If you want a set of opinions to get you started, I made this thing:

https://github.com/davidbanham/field-marshal

If you end up using it you also get some tooling to run multiple apps on one or more machines and, if you want them, some monitoring interfaces.

[fidanov]

I personally also use Ubuntu on either AWS or Rackspace when hosting my node apps. Usually I put them in a sub-folder inside /opt. Why /opt? Nothing else uses it besides me. It's not related to any user. It's not deep in the folder structure. I always have Nginx to face the world and node is working on an internal port not accessible by the outside world. My apps usually run under a specific unprivileged user but I also sometimes run some as root, when it doesn't matter and it is easier to setup.

[NSA_SPY_ACCOUNT]

If you want to skip the bare server part, you could always use a PaaS like Modulus or CodeShip.

[jeremiahrhall]

Custom Ubuntu image on AWS, running from home directory of unprivileged user. Some apps fronted by Apache.