Raspberry Pi <3 Node
I remember trying to get Node to run on the Pi when I first got one and it really wasn’t a fun journey, things seem to have changed (or my Google-foo has gotten better) and it’s dead simple.
Install Node and NPM
Best guide was from Adafruit. These deb’s are actually more up to date than the Pi builds available of the official NodeJS site.
For the basic guide:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb
node -v
Setup hostname for Pi
Once you have NodeJS installed (with NPM which installs with it), the obvious next thing is to build a server. I already had something super basic up and running and I wanted to access it locally on my network.
On the Pi itself I could access my Node site with http://localhost:3000/. I could even access this on computers on the local network by using the Raspberry Pi’s IP address (For example http://192.168.0.xxx:3000).
What would be better is if I could have a URL like: http://myrpi/ and everything just started to work.
This is where the lovely gentleman that is Pete LePage helped me by telling me to install the avahi-daemon and then pointed out that I can access my sites with whatever is in the /etc/hosts file followed by .local.
Let’s step through this and get it running.
First install the daemon, which basically broadcasts the host on the local network.
sudo apt-get install avahi-daemonSet a name in the /etc/hosts file, lets say myrpi.
First open up the file to edit
sudo nano /etc/hostsAt the bottom of our /etc/hosts/ file add the following.
127.0.1.1 myrpi
This is simply an IP address that can be used to define the hostname for the machine.
- Press Ctrl+x and then press y to save the file and exit nano.
Ensure your Node server is running something, and if so, try out your URL in a browser by typing http://myrpi.local:3000/. If anything goes wrong, try rebooting your Pi.
One side note of this. In my router I can define a hostname for each attached device, if I set the hostname to ‘myrpi’ I don’t actually need to type in the .local part of the URL, in fact http://myrpi:3000 is all that is needed.
No Port Number & Start on Boot
The next thing I wanted to do was have the Node server start up whenever I started up the Raspberry Pi. I did this by adding a script to /etc/init.d/ which basically starts the Node server using forever.
For those new to forever it’s basically an node app which given a seperate Node script to run, it will start the script and run it forever, restarting it if it ever crashes.
To do this, the steps are as follows.
Install forever globally.
Install forever globally so that scripts can access it anywhere on the pi, you do this with the -g command.
sudo npm install -g forever
Create Your Startup Script
I ended up using something similar to the script below, I try and explain each part afterwards.
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: <name-of-script>
# Required-Start: $remote_fs $named $syslog
# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $named $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: <Short Description>
# Description: <Longer Description>
### END INIT INFO
#!/bin/bash
PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
NODESCRIPT=<Path to Script>
case "$1" in
start)
# The -A indicates, adding of this rule
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
sudo -u pi forever start $NODESCRIPT/cli.js
;;
stop)
sudo -u pi forever stop $NODESCRIPT/cli.js
# The -D indicates, deleting of this rule
sudo iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
sudo iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/<name-of-script> {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac
exit 0
The LSB Section
The BEGIN INIT INFO to END INIT INFO is essentially a specific format for init scripts which Debian looks for. I think it’s used for dependency management.
You can find out more info on LSB Init Scripts on this page if you’re curious.
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: <name-of-script>
# Required-Start: $remote_fs $named $syslog
# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $named $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: <Short Description>
# Description: <Longer Description>
### END INIT INFO
Bash and Variables
The second section declares the script as a bash script and appends some directories to the *$PATH * the script executes in and I also define the path of the Node script I want to run as $NODESCRIPT.
#!/bin/bash
PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
NODESCRIPT=<Path to Script>
Script Start
The script is designed to run with the command sudo /etc/init.d/my-script start or sudo /etc/init.d/my-script stop. In the next bit of the script we take the first variable from the command line, in this case it will be the start or stop text and if it’s start we add two rules to the iptables and then start our Node script with sudo forever start $NODESCRIPT/cli.js.
There are a few things to step through for start.
The iptables commands are the thing which makes requests on port 80, redirect to port 3000. What this means is when I type http://myrpi.local/ the request will arrive at the Pi on port 80, this rule then redirect from port 80 to port 3000. The reason we have two is because we need to do it for both ethernet and wifi connections. You might be able to cut this down into one.
If your router supports it, you can forward port 80 to port 3000 and avoid having to do any of this.
I’ve run the forever script with sudo -u pi. The reason I’ve done this, is otherwise forever starts the scripts under some unknown user, meaning I can’t then stop the forever task reliably. If I use sudo -u pi, I can always run the stop command under pi, which has access to the forever task and can hence, stop it.
case "$1" in
start)
# The -A indicates, adding of this rule
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
sudo -u pi forever start $NODESCRIPT/cli.js
;;
The Final Step to Stop the Server
To stop the server, we do the reverse of the above. We stop the forever task and remove the iptable entries.
stop)
sudo -u pi forever stop $NODESCRIPT/cli.js
# The -D indicates, deleting of this rule
sudo iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
sudo iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
;;
*)
The final bit of the script (shown below), simply prints out a message if you don’t add a start or stop to the end of the command.
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/<name-of-script> {start|stop}"
exit 1
Moment of Truth
Check everything runs from the command line, no startup yet.
Save your script to /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod u+x /etc/init.d/<startup-scrtipt-name>.sh
Then try to start the server with the script.
sudo /etc/init.d/<startup-scrtipt-name>.sh start
If everything works as expect, test stopping the server.
sudo /etc/init.d/<startup-scrtipt-name>.sh stop
Everything will hopefully stop as you’d expect and now you can sudo reboot and shortly after booting, you’ll see your server start working.
Setup for DynDNS Usage
After I got through all this, I really wanted to setup Dynamic DNS, originally I thought I wasn’t bothered.
I went with noip.com, you just need to set up a host and then configure some way of updating them with Port Forwarding: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9356/11/how-to-configure-a-ddwrt-router
Orig. Image: https://flic.kr/p/c1gNLw
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