Important Updated Node.JS application hosting support

[Alexey Sobolev]

Good day, everyone!

In an effort to make Plesk a better tool for Node.JS developers and those who want to provide Node.JS application hosting to their clients, we have made several significant improvements over the past few months. I’d like to take this chance to highlight those improvements and invite those interested to test-drive and to start using Plesk for Node.JS hosting.

1. For a while, the support for the latest versions of Node.JS was lacking. We have made it so that the LTS and Current versions are installed and updated automatically. Please note that Node.JS 18 not supported by a number of older operating systems, see the detailed list here: Software Requirements for Plesk Obsidian.
2. You can now choose which package manager to use, NPM (available previously) or Yarn.
3. We have had some requests to allow users execute NPM commands from the shell. It is now possible. In the future, we also plan to make it possible for the chrooted environments.
4. The logs for a hosted Node.JS application can now be viewed using Plesk Log Browser for the domain the application is hosted on.

We have updated our blog article with the new information: How to Host Node.js Applications on Plesk Obsidian. If you are new to Node.JS application hosting with Plesk, it’s the best place to start. It also contains some useful advice for experienced Plesk users.

To continue with our improvements, we’d like to know more about your particular scenarios, how you use Plesk to host Node.JS applications: do you host applications for yourself or your customers, what kind of applications, what kind of processes and technologies are used in the development process. Feel free to share your experience here and keep an eye out for our thematic surveys.

-- Your Plesk Team

 

[benacler]

I always host static stuff outside of node.js , so if would be cool to have node running on a different port and map an URL to it i.e. mydomain.com/api:9000 and host the static stuff on nginx/apache. I cannot figure how to implement such setup with your extension and I'm still using node.js on an nginx/node separate server, but having it in plesk would be an huge boost!

 

[Frostbolt]

Hi,

We're currently developing a real-time multiplayer game in nodejs.

We've started developing this before the update, and we could always find the error logs in /var/log/nginx
Since a few weeks, the errors are no longer there. We can't really find the errors now

 

[Kevin Quiskamp]

Hi,

We're currently developing a real-time multiplayer game in nodejs.

We've started developing this before the update, and we could always find the error logs in /var/log/nginx
Since a few weeks, the errors are no longer there. We can't really find the errors now

Same error here.

/var/log/nginx and /var/log/apache2 are empty now


Over 50 NodeJS Applications and no longer any logs.

The Log Browser didn't show the “NodeJS” dropdown option.

 

[Alexey Sobolev]

Hey! Thanks for reporting the issue with the logs. We will look into it.

 

[topkat2]

Hi,
I have spent two days figuring out how to use custom port for nodeJs website. Impossible to edit nginx conf to forward / to :9999/. Impossible to disable nodeJs app nor bypass passenger for website as I want to use PM2, which is way better IMO. The only way it did work is by modifying .htaccess file in the document root of my application to forward all api/ to :9999/api/. But that's a real hack.

I don't want to use passenger since seeing simple real time logs in the console (ssh) was impossible for me...and log via UI are too much cluttered.

Using Plesk with NodeJs is really a pain although plesk has a very potential here. But for the moment it's way too hard to have a simple setup.

So my questions:
How can I see passenger logs real time in the console for a nodeJs app ?
Is it possible to run nodeJs app on a custom port and still being served at Web Hosting, Domain Name Registration - MyDomain.com ?

Thanks for your time, I am really looking forward nodeJs support evolutions

 

[Matthias Schulz]

I just installed nodejs, but i don't get any logfile messages from errors or console.logs within my app.js (which runs as it should). I see the checkbox for Node.js under logs, which seems connected to /var/log/passenger/passenger.log, but the file keeps empty. And there is another new folder under [files]/logs/[node-js-server-domain], but it is empty at all.

I'm running a Linux with Plesk v18.0.46 Update 1. (21. September 2022)

 

[macmee]

Good day, everyone!

In an effort to make Plesk a better tool for Node.JS developers and those who want to provide Node.JS application hosting to their clients, we have made several significant improvements over the past few months. I’d like to take this chance to highlight those improvements and invite those interested to test-drive and to start using Plesk for Node.JS hosting.

1. For a while, the support for the latest versions of Node.JS was lacking. We have made it so that the LTS and Current versions are installed and updated automatically. Please note that Node.JS 18 not supported by a number of older operating systems, see the detailed list here: Software Requirements for Plesk Obsidian.
2. You can now choose which package manager to use, NPM (available previously) or Yarn.
3. We have had some requests to allow users execute NPM commands from the shell. It is now possible. In the future, we also plan to make it possible for the chrooted environments.
4. The logs for a hosted Node.JS application can now be viewed using Plesk Log Browser for the domain the application is hosted on.

We have updated our blog article with the new information: How to Host Node.js Applications on Plesk Obsidian. If you are new to Node.JS application hosting with Plesk, it’s the best place to start. It also contains some useful advice for experienced Plesk users.

To continue with our improvements, we’d like to know more about your particular scenarios, how you use Plesk to host Node.JS applications: do you host applications for yourself or your customers, what kind of applications, what kind of processes and technologies are used in the development process. Feel free to share your experience here and keep an eye out for our thematic surveys.

-- Your Plesk Team

Logging for nodejs has been broken for a very long time. The above folks have this issue, I do and even other folks online report it:

https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021105674-Where-are-the-Node-js-logs-located-

Alex can you please help us friend?