settings.json is deleted when running with forever process

[iteratelance]

This is not necessarily a bug but a pretty big gotcha and I think a better solution could be implemented.

Executing the following command:

forever start -w -a -l ~/log/admin.log node_modules/express-admin/app.js ./config

Will delete your config/settings.json file.

In app.js the following code will cause the settings file to temporarily be empty and trigger a reload by forever. Ultimately this causes forever to fail and deletes the settings.json file.

var fpath = path.join(args.dpath, 'settings.json'),
  updated = settings.refresh(args.settings, data);
fs.writeFileSync(fpath, JSON.stringify(updated, null, 4), 'utf8');

A workaround is to run forever with a --spinSleepTime so the file has time to write.

forever start --spinSleepTime=3000 -w -a -l ~/log/admin.log node_modules/express-admin/app.js ./config

Perhaps a better solution would be to maintain a schema.json file that is different from use generated settings.json and then merge them together at runtime using a loadash utility.

Something like:

var fpath = path.join(args.dpath, 'settings.json'),
  _.defaults(mergedSettings, userSettings, defaultSettings);
fs.writeFileSync(fpath, JSON.stringify(mergedSettings, null, 4), 'utf8');

[simov]

Thanks for the workaround, let's keep this open for future reference :+1:

[iteratelance]

Just wanted to add one more comment to this.

I've currently been exploring https://github.com/Unitech/pm2 and http://pm2.keymetrics.io/docs/usage/application-declaration/ rather than forever and the same issue occurs.

I've tried playing with all the following options and nothign seems to work. https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar#path-filtering

    "watch_options": {
      "usePolling" : true,
      "interval"    : 5000,
      "alwaysStat": true,
      "awaitWriteFinish": {
        "stabilityThreshold": 5000,
        "pollInterval": 5000
      },
      "atomic": 5000
    },

I guess for now I'll just have to restart on deploy.

If I haven't mentioned it, thanks for this tool, it's great for quick starting projects.