I’m forcing myself to build websites to back my domain names. If you didn’t know this about me, I love buying domain names. Sadly, I’ve been lax about making use of them.

Beautiful names like http://ware.haus and http://one.haus are wasted.

Well actually one.haus is set up with No-Ip to give my personal machines subdomains, but that service has proven less than useful to me.

To get back into the web space, I chose to play with MEAN.

I head on over to the tutorial page and get cracking. My target server is a 512mb Digital Ocean droplet with Ubuntu 14.04.

Everything goes smoothly for the most part. I did hit a few snags:

mean init

This command initializes your application. It creates a directory of your choosing with a skeleton app.

If for any reason this fails (root owns ~/.npm, oops), the directory is still created. Simply running mean init again errors out due to the directory already existing. I had to rm -rf that shit and it’s annoying.

The tool offers to set up an admin user but requires a password of either letters, numbers or dashes with max length 15. What the hell.

npm install

The process is killed if the process requires more memory than is available. No error message beyond “Killed” is emitted. This step will fail on a 512mb instance.

The accepted workaround is to either create or expand the swapfile used by the system.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/npm-gets-killed-no-matter-what

I’ll make another post about my actual development experiences, stay tuned!