Upstart / init script not working - init

Question

I'm trying to create a service / script to automatically start and controll my nodejs server, but it doesnt seem to work at all.
First of all, I used this source as main reference http://kvz.io/blog/2009/12/15/run-nodejs-as-a-service-on-ubuntu-karmic/
After testing around, I minimzed the content of the actual file to avoid any kind of error, resulting in this (the bare minimum, but it doesnt work)
description "server"
author "blah"
start on started mountall
stop on shutdown
respawn
respawn limit 99 5
script
export HOME="/var/www"
exec nodejs /var/www/server/server.js >> /var/log/node.log 2>&1
end script
The file is saved in /etc/init/server.conf
when trying to start the script (as root, or normal user), I get:
root#iof304:/etc/init# start server
start: Job failed to start
Then, I tried to check my syntax with init-checkconf, resulting in:
$ init-checkconf /etc/init/server.conf
File /etc/init/server.conf: syntax ok
I tried different other things, like initctl reload-configuration with no result.
What can I do? How can I get this to work? It can't be that hard, right?

Answer 1

This is what our typical startup script looks like. As you can see we're running our node processes as user nodejs. We're also using the pre-start script to make sure all of the log file directories and .tmp directories are created with the right permissions.
#!upstart
description "grabagadget node.js server"
author "Jeffrey Van Alstine"
start on started mysql
stop on shutdown
respawn
script
export HOME="/home/nodejs"
exec start-stop-daemon --start --chuid nodejs --make-pidfile --pidfile /var/run/nodejs/grabagadget.pid --startas /usr/bin/node -- /var/nodejs/grabagadget/app.js --environment production >> /var/log/nodejs/grabagadget.log 2>&1
end script
pre-start script
mkdir -p /var/log/nodejs
chown nodejs:root /var/log/nodejs
mkdir -p /var/run/nodejs
mkdir -p /var/nodejs/grabagadget/.tmp
# Git likes to reset permissions on this file, but it really needs to be writable on server start
chown nodejs:root /var/nodejs/grabagadget/views/layout.ejs
chown -R nodejs:root /var/nodejs/grabagadget/.tmp
# Date format same as (new Date()).toISOString() for consistency
sudo -u nodejs echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (sys) Starting" >> /var/log/nodejs/grabagadget.log
end script
pre-stop script
rm /var/run/nodejs/grabagadget.pid
sudo -u nodejs echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (sys) Stopping" >> /var/log/nodejs/grabgadget.log
end script

Answer 2

As of Ubuntu 15, upstart is no longer being used, see systemd.