VPS

You can also run Camel easily on a VPS like Linode or DigitalOcean with your favorite Linux distro and Nginx. All we need for that is a server instance running and secured. If you don't know anything about Linux and servers but want to learn how to operate them you can simply check out their great documentation (linode or digitalocean) which will get your VPS up and runnig in ~30 minutes.

Since Camel is written in NodeJS we obviously need NodeJS.

apt-get install nodejs

to install NodeJS. With that package comes NPM which we'll also need later.

Now that we have NodeJS we'll install Nginx.

apt-get install nginx

This will be your webserver serving your blog to the internet.

The next step will be cloning Camel directly from Github. If you haven't already installed it chances are quite high that your distro DOES NOT come with Git installed.

apt-get install git

to get the latest git version.

With Git installed you can go ahead move where Camel will live.

cd /var/www

to move into the directory created by Nginx.

git clone https://github.com/cliss/camel.git

to clone the repo from Github.

Now that you have optained a copy of Camel you have to get all the dependecies it needs. This is what we need NPM for.

cd camel
npm install

Npm will look at everything Camel needs and installs it.

After the installation is completed we want Nginx to proxy Camel to the world. We can do this by creating a new config file for Nginx to look at by running

cd /etc/nginx
nano sites-available/camel.conf

A really basic text editor will show up and you can copy this config into it.

	server {
		listen 80;
		server_name -> your IP or domain name <- ;

		location / {
	    	proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
	   		proxy_set_header   Host      $http_host;
	    	proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:5000;
	
		}
	}

Camel is running locally on port 5000 and Nginx will just proxy all requests back and forth. The next thing we need to do is that we need to enable the site and the restart Nginx so that we can access it.

cp sites-available/camel.conf sites-enabled/camel.conf
service nginx restart

Since we want Camel to run at all times and not start or stop it once our session breakes we will need something that will take care of this for us. There are options but for now we will use forever.

npm install -g forever

Now that we have all the things needed to run Camel on our own VPS you can go ahead and launch everything.

Forever is really easy to use but has one qurik to it. You have to tell it where the root of Camel is. Since we already are in Camels directory we can just run

forever start camel.js

This will start camel and it is now available at the IP or domain you specified in your camel.conf file Nginx uses.

If you want to stop Camel again just use (if you are in Camel's directory)

forever stop camel.js 

and you can check on how forever is doing and if the proccess is running by using

forever list

after you cd into Camel's directory.