The sample instructions on setting up HouseMon are OK for initial testing, but require a bit more work for a permanent installation. This post describes how I managed it.

The redis server should be moved to run as a service, I used the quickstart guide from the redis documentation as described in the section “Installing Redis more properly”, modified a little to suit my preferences. Instead of using the port number to describe the redis instance I used “housemon”, the only issue this caused was with the init script that uses the value both as a port number and the instance identifier, so I modified the start of that script a little:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

--- ../redis-2.6.12/utils/redis_init_script     2013-03-29 16:42:39.000000000 +0000
+++ /etc/init.d/redis_housemon  2013-05-07 23:44:01.042072032 +0100
@@ -4,11 +4,12 @@
 # as it does use of the /proc filesystem.

 REDISPORT=6379
+REDISINST=housemon
 EXEC=/usr/local/bin/redis-server
 CLIEXEC=/usr/local/bin/redis-cli

-PIDFILE=/var/run/redis_${REDISPORT}.pid
-CONF="/etc/redis/${REDISPORT}.conf"
+PIDFILE=/var/run/redis_${REDISINST}.pid
+CONF="/etc/redis/${REDISINST}.conf"

 case "$1" in
     start)

I also used forever to run the housemon server, install it with sudo npm install -g forever and then start Housemon with forever start app.js.