radio/deploy

Deploying daveo-radio

The app lives at davidwindham.com/radio — a long-running Node process that Apache proxies to, same shape as /chess and /ask. It is not served from the web docroot.

The one thing that's different from chess

This app has a build step. Express serves app/, which is compiled from src/ by esbuild and is gitignored — it is not in the repo. So production must build it, and building needs the devDependencies (esbuild, bootstrap, handlebars). That means a full npm install, not npm ci --omit=dev.

Every deploy is therefore: pull → install → build → restart.

First-time setup

1. Check out the repo on the server (e.g. /var/www/radio).

The default branch tracks master. If you deployed the modernize branch, check that out instead.

1. Build.

   npm install          # full — the build needs the devDeps
   npm run build        # src/ -> app/
   

   1. Configure secrets. All operational config (PORT, BASE_PATH, TRUST_PROXY, stream URLs) is set by the process manager below. The only secret is the Last.fm API key. Put it in a gitignored .env in the repo root: sh echo 'LASTFM_API_KEY=your-key-here' > .env

Unset is fine too — the sidebar lists just stay empty and the app still runs.

1. Start it — pick one process manager:

pm2 (matches chess-io):

   pm2 start ecosystem.config.cjs
   pm2 logs radio --lines 5     # confirm  basePath":"/radio"
   pm2 save                     # remember across reboots
   pm2 startup                  # prints a sudo command to enable on boot

or systemd:

   sudo cp deploy/radio.service.example /etc/systemd/system/radio.service
   # edit User/Group/WorkingDirectory in it first
   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   sudo systemctl enable --now radio

1. Add the Apache proxy. Paste the block from deploy/apache-radio.conf.example into the existing davidwindham.com vhost (both :80 and :443) — not a new vhost. Check the Apache version first (apachectl -v); the file has Option A for 2.4.47+ and Option B for older. Then:

   apachectl configtest && sudo systemctl reload apache2   # or: apachectl -k graceful
   

   1. Verify: sh curl -s https://davidwindham.com/radio/health # {"ok":true,...} curl -s https://davidwindham.com/radio/api/status # {"online":...}

Then load https://davidwindham.com/radio/ in a browser and confirm the chat connects (network tab: a 101 Switching Protocols on /radio/socket.io/… means the websocket upgraded; HTTP 200 long-polls mean the Apache upgrade rule isn't matching).

Redeploying new code

git pull && npm install && npm run build && pm2 restart radio
#                                            (or: sudo systemctl restart radio)

Optional, to slim node_modules after building — the devDeps are only needed at build time, since their output is baked into app/:

npm prune --omit=dev     # run AFTER npm run build, never before

Prerequisites on the server

• Node 20+ (22.9+ if you use the --env-file-if-exists line in ecosystem.config.cjs; on older Node, put LASTFM_API_KEY in the pm2 env block or a systemd drop-in instead).
• Apache with proxy proxy_http rewrite (proxy_wstunnel too if you're on Option B).
• Icecast reachable at stream.davidawindham.com over https — the player and the /api/status proxy both need it, and http is blocked as mixed content on the TLS page.
• Redis is NOT required. Leave REDIS_URL unset and the app runs single-process, keeping chat state in memory. Only set it (and only then raise pm2 instances) if you ever need to scale to multiple processes.

Notes

• No auth, by design. The page, the chat socket, and the Icecast stream are all reachable by anyone with the URL. This is a deliberate choice for a personal page — noted here so it's not a surprise.
• DAW_ORIGIN must stay unset in production. It's a local-dev-only shim that proxies /embed (the shared site chrome) to the main site when there's no Apache in front of node. In production Apache serves /embed from the docroot.
• The Last.fm key currently in git history (e12ea1d0…) is worth rotating — it's read-only public data and now server-side only, so low stakes, but the rotation is free.