cloudhead / golem

pre-forking HTTP server for node (old)

golem

pre-forking HTTP server for node.

introduction

golem was directly inspired by unicorn and nginx, in its pre-forking model, UNIX-oriented design and signal handling. Unlike unicorn, it is capable of handling slow clients, and doesn't need to run behind a load-balancer. This is due to node being inherently designed for slow clients.

overview

golem is started with the golem command, which takes a number of options, and a path to the application file:

$ golem -p 8888 -n 2 server/index.js

See the examples/ folder for examples. For information on all the options, see the golem(1) man page.

One may choose to start golem in daemonized mode, this is simply achieved by passing the -D flag. golem will then fork itself twice, start a new session and detach itself from the terminal. If the child process hasn't encountered any errors, it will signal its grand-parent (which will exit promptly), and start listening for connections.

Once it's started accepting connections, golem distributes the load amongst its worker processes. If a worker dies, it is respawned immediately. The running instance can be controlled via standard POSIX signals, such as SIGHUP and SIGQUIT:

$ kill -s SIGQUIT `cat /var/run/golem.pid`

This performs a graceful shutdown of the master and all workers.

logging

golem has several ways of logging:

stdout/stderr

This is the default, when in development mode. Output is to current terminal.

log file

This is the default, when in production mode. Output is to a file of your choosing. It defaults to /var/log/golem.log, this can be changed via the command-line, with the --log option, and similarly in the server file.

custom logger

We can specify a custom logger, by setting the logger option in the server file, for example if we want syslog logging, we can do:

config.logger = syslog.createClient(514, 'localhost');

documentation

See the golem(1) man page for specifics. Alternatively, you can view doc/golem.1.md.

development

Run make to build the source files, make install to install.

license

golem is licensed under the AGPLv3 license. See LICENSE for more information.

copyright

Copyright (C) 2011 Alexis Sellier