Installation - mrvisser/node-cowboy GitHub Wiki

Installation is pretty easy. Behold:

Install Redis

All cattle server nodes as well as the node where you execute cowboy commands (it can be from any one of the nodes, really) should communicate with the same Redis server.

Download and install Redis on the machine that will facilitate communication. Ensure it is listening on port 6379 and your firewall allows traffic on that port from your server nodes.

Install Bunyan and Cowboy

Since cowboy uses Bunyan for logging, it will be useful to have the binary installed to pipe logs in case you have to do some troubleshooting at some point:

npm install -g bunyan cowboy

You'll want to install these on all servers that you want to control with cowboy, so it would be good to include it in whatever provisioning mechanism you use to deploy servers. You'll want to automate the configuration file deployment as well.

Daemonize the cattle server

You want the cattle server to always be running on the server machines. Always. Dare I say, forever? Use a daemonizing utility such as forever, Upstart, whatever you're familiar with to run the cattle process indefinitely.