Making a turn-based game: setting up DreamHost for NodeJS

Recently, I've taken an idea I started prototyping on boardgamearena and moved it to my personal server. it's been an exciting project so far, and I'm getting close to showing it off widely.

I'm going to do a few posts talking through the process of getting the game working. This one will go into getting DreamHost to run a Node server.

Using boardgame.io with DreamHost

DreamHost uses a shared Phusion Passenger instance to host web apps, which is compatible with NodeJS apps. Details of configuration are helpfully provided in their documentation and an associated example. To start, I set up a new subdomain and made sure to enable Passenger on it.

DreamHost expects the NodeJS app you want to serve to exist as an app.js file at the root of the domain directory. My first attempt was to set up one of the example scripts, but it immediately crashed. Hand-running on port :8888 by executing node app.js in an SSH terminal succeeded. I followed some of the troubleshooting advice (chmod 755 app.js, then mkdir tmp; touch tmp/restart.txt to force Passenger to restart its instance of my server). No luck, so I modified the .htaccess file at the domain root to offer some more details:

PassengerNodejs /home/myusername/.nvm/versions/node/v12.22.7/bin/node PassengerFriendlyErrorPages on

Adding PassengerFriendlyErrorPages helped here; turns out I was seeing

*** ERROR ***: Cannot execute /usr/bin/node: No such file or directory (2)]

At this point, I got a little stuck and filed a support ticket to DreamHost. It didn't take them more than an hour to respond, and the solution was straightforward: turns out I was the first person trying to use Node on this shared server, and the Passenger Phusion server itself needed a restart. Heh.

After the restart, I got a successful Hello World message. next step was to begin setting up my boardgame.io project on my local machine.

We'll go into that next week.