How can I automatically start a node.js application in Amazon Linux AMI on aws?

You can use forever-service for provisioning node script as a service and automatically starting during boots. Following commands will do the needful,

npm install -g forever-service
forever-service install test

This will provision app.js in the current directory as a service via forever. The service will automatically restart every time system is restarted. Also when stopped it will attempt a graceful stop. This script provisions the logrotate script as well.

Github url: https://github.com/zapty/forever-service

As of now forever-service supports Amazon Linux, CentOS, Redhat support for other Linux distro, Mac and Windows are in works..

NOTE: I am the author of forever-service.

One way is to create an upstart job. That way your app will start once Linux loads, will restart automatically if it crashes, and you can start / stop / restart it by sudo start yourapp / sudo stop yourapp / sudo restart yourapp.

Here are beginning steps:

1) Install upstart utility (may be pre-installed if you use a standard Amazon Linux AMI):

sudo yum install upstart

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install upstart

2) Create upstart script for your node app:

in /etc/init add file yourappname.conf with the following lines of code:

#!upstart
description "your app name"

start on started mountall
stop on shutdown

# Automatically Respawn:
respawn
respawn limit 99 5

env NODE_ENV=development

# Warning: this runs node as root user, which is a security risk
# in many scenarios, but upstart-ing a process as a non-root user
# is outside the scope of this question
exec node /path_to_your_app/app.js >> /var/log/yourappname.log 2>&1

3) start your app by sudo start yourappname