I got my own linode server the other day and moved a small nodejs / express I was playing around with over from an aws linux. Everything works great, but if I launch the app with upstart it doesnt run with the right permissions and can't write files to disk. I tried all kinds of variations of the upstart script, as root, as my username, www-data and nothing works. I set the public directory of express to 777 even just as a test but no luck. I start my upstart job with sudo start now-images-manager. When I run ps -ef I get the following output:

root     25150     1  0 11:26 ?        00:00:00 sudo node /home/myusername/sites/now-images-manager/app.js
root     25151 25150  0 11:26 ?        00:00:03 node /home/myusername/sites/now-images-manager/app.js

Here is my upstart script:

#!upstart
description "now-images-manager startup script"
author      "me@me.com"

start on startup
stop on shutdown

script
    export HOME="/root"
    echo $$ > /var/run/now-images-manager.pid
    exec sudo node /home/myusername/sites/now-images-manager/app.js >> /home/myusername/sites/now-images-manager/now-images-manager.sys.log 2>&1
    # exec sudo -u myusername /usr/bin/node /home/myusername/sites/now-images-manager/app.js >> /home/myusername/sites/now-images-manager/now-images-manager.sys.log 2>&1
end script

pre-start script
    # Date format same as (new Date()).toISOString() for consistency
    echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (sys) Starting" >> /var/log/now-images-manager.sys.log
end script

pre-stop script
    rm /var/run/now-images-manager.pid
    echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (sys) Stopping" >> /var/log/now-images-manager.sys.log
end script

Here is a sample from the log:

downloadFileFromURL  { [Error: ENOENT, open 'public/images/tumblr_m9h1uh4KSi1qzl9k6o1_500.jpg']
  errno: 34,
  code: 'ENOENT',
  path: 'public/images/tumblr_m9h1uh4KSi1qzl9k6o1_500.jpg' }
When I start the app with node app.js in the shell it works perfectly fine.

ENOENT means "no such file or directory." It looks like your app is using a relative path to the file; is it possible it's not starting from the directory you think it is? If you run it by hand from the "right" directory, that may explain why it works then.

Vance, thanks so much for the reply. Fixed it. Should have noticed this myself!

Thomas