I recently enjoyed a great article by Alex Young from DailyJS, called “Hosting Node Apps” (http://dailyjs.com/2010/03/15/hosting-nodejs-apps/).  However, my server runs on CentOS so setting it up was a little bit different.  Here’s what I did to setup, hopefully it helps you out as well.

Grab Core Dependencies

yum install sudo nginx unzip gcc-c++ screen git-core monit

Install NodeJS

Clone,

git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git

then Build

./configure
make
make install

Configure nginx Web Server

Edit the virtual host configuration file at:

/etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf

Add the following to the end of the file:

upstream app_cluster_1 {
        server 127.0.0.1:8000;
}

server {
        listen 0.0.0.0:80;
        server_name nodetest.local nodetest;
        access_log /var/log/nginx/nodetest.log;

        location / {
          proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
          proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
          proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
          proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;

          proxy_pass http://app_cluster_1/;
          proxy_redirect off;
        }
}

Save and reload nginx:

service nginx reload

Create a Node App

Make a quick sample app at:

/var/www/apps/hello_world/example.js

Putting in the following contents:

var sys = require("sys"),
   http = require("http");
http.createServer(function (request, response) {
  response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
  response.end("Hello World");
}).listen(8000);
sys.puts("Server running at 127.0.0.1:8000");

Set up Monit

Create a new configuration file for monit at:

/etc/monit.d/hello_world

Putting in the following contents:

check host hello_world with address 127.0.0.1
    start program = "/usr/local/bin/node /var/www/apps/hello_world/example.js"
    stop program  = "/usr/bin/pkill -f 'node /var/www/apps/hello_world/example.js'"
    if failed port 8000 protocol HTTP
        request /
        with timeout 10 seconds
        then restart

Then restart monit for the configuration to take place:

monit start all && service monit restart

All set!

Go ahead and point your browser to http://nodetest.local to see a “Hello World” page (if everything worked!).  For more details on the how and why and for additional resources, check out Alex’s article.  This is just intended to give a quick start for CentOS 5 users since some of the commands and packages are different.