I somehow had it in my head that `realpath` would crash if the file didn't exist, but that's super not true! It returns the tentative path for if you _were_ gonna create this!
I'm not doing this thoroughly enough for it to matter (e.g. the deployed rsynced versions aren't having the group permissions set).
I think doing this *right* (to be extensible to additional users) is too much complexity to be worth it, and doing it halfway is more confusing than helpful.
I did this because I was anticipating multi-users permissions to be a bit of an issue for like, granting the web server permission to access the source code. But it turns out, since we're running with pm2, it's all working just fine!
Okay well, we added monit to solve a problem that I coincidentally solved within an hour of getting monit working lol!
This also enables us to remove the pm2 pid file, which we were only using to allow monit to track the pm2 app.
Okay huh, while digging a bit into another issue, I found what was wrong with our config and pm2's built-in monitoring! You can't use `yarn start`, because the wrapper script breaks its ability to look inside and see what's happening.
I also removed the compiler flag thing from the `start` script in `package.json`, because I think it's redundant? There's no compilation to be done in a live server.
I think I might remove monit after this? It's nice extra resilience in a sense, but it feels like extra complexity when it's doing the job `pm2` is supposed to do. (And tbh I've almost never heard of nginx crashing, and if it does it's probably a scenario worth investigating by hand.)
Oops, I didn't understand the different multiline string formats in YAML! I was using one that chomped through newlines, and converted them to normal spaces.
I think that didn't matter in this context anyway? because indentation is an exception to this behavior. What a weird behavior!
Anyway, uhh, yeah, I'll use the simpler multiline string format now 😅 for consistency and clarity!
When I woke up this morning, the app had crashed because the mysql connection was closed!
I'm not sure, why that caused a _crash_? Or why pm2 didn't pick up on it, and said the process was still online? (Maybe the process was running, but the server had stopped?) Those could be good to investigate?…
…but better than diving too far into the details, is to just address the high-level problem: if the app goes down for unexpected reasons, I want it back up!! lol
In this change, we add `monit`, a solid system for monitoring processes (including checking for behavior, like responding to net requests), and configure it to watch the app process and the nginx process.
To test, you can run `pm2 stop impress-2020`, or `systemctl stop nginx`, to see that Monit brings them back up within seconds!
This does add some potential surprise if you're _trying_ to take the processes down. The easiest way is to send the stop command through monit, like `monit stop nginx`. This will disable monitoring until you start it again through monit, I think? (You can also disable/enable monitoring as a direct command, regardless of app state.)
You can see how, instead of the default experience where certbot edits your config for you, I've referenced the certificates in the config in the first place, and set up certbot to just generate them!
Also, I learned about certbot non-interactive mode! At first I wrote this with the Ansible `expect` module lol :p
I was copying over an old create-react-app build folder, and the app was crashing remotely because there was no build!
Anyway woo it looks like the app is at least running now, `curl localhost:3000` shows results! >:3
I was sorting by version name, which _was_ reliable until I changed my version name format, and then a deploy cleaned up the version it had just deployed because it no longer sorted to the end!
Rather than be dependent on a stable version name format, and set myself up for more surprises, I'm going to instead use the folder's modified time. While there could be surprising ways for folder timestamps to be updated, I expect it to be _more_ reliable overall.
Huh, I was previously using ISO timestamps, but it turns out Yarn doesn't handle binary paths very reliably when your folder names contain colons 😳 so `canvas` was failing with `node-gyp not found`
I've documented it here in this self-answered StackOverflow question, so hopefully the next future person searching will find my answer! https://stackoverflow.com/q/69819597/107415
