Tips & Tricks to get started with Butler SOS

[mountaindude]

While it's usually pretty easy to get Butler SOS off the ground, there are a few things to keep in mind.
No reason to struggle with these if others have already solved them, right?

1: NODE_ENV environment variable doesn't match name of config file

Let's say you get this error when starting Butler SOS:

C:\tool\butler-sos-5.6.2\src>node butler-sos.js
WARNING: NODE_ENV value of 'product' did not match any deployment config file names.
WARNING: See https://github.com/lorenwest/node-config/wiki/Strict-Mode
WARNING: No configurations found in configuration directory:C:\tool\butler-sos-5.6.2\src\config
WARNING: To disable this warning set SUPPRESS_NO_CONFIG_WARNING in the environment.

Documentation from butler-sos.ptarmiganlabs.com here.

Butler SOS takes all its settings from a config file - but you have to tell Butler SOS which config file to use.
This is done via an environment variable called NODE_ENV.

If NODE_ENV is set to abc123, Butler will look for a config file called abc123.yaml, abc123.yml or abc123.json.
Yes, even though the Butler SOS docs only talk about YAML config files, JSON can also be used. YAML is highly recommended though, as it's much more human readable and in general easier to work with.
Both yaml and yml file extensions work equally well.

Butler will always look for the config file in a directory called config directly under the directory where butler-sos.js (which is the main entrypoint into the app) is located.
So, for the example above:

Let's say Butler SOS is extracted to c:\tools\butler-sos-5.6.2. The butler-sos.js file is then in d:\tools\butler-sos-5.6.2\src.
Setting NODE_ENV=abc123 will make Butler SOS look for a config file called d:\tools\butler-sos-5.6.2\src\abc123.yaml

In a real-life scenario you want to use a more relevant name for the config file.
production.yaml could for example be used if your Butler SOS instance is used to monitor a Qlik Sense production environment. With the same logic, development.yaml could be used if it's a Qlik Sense development cluster that should be monitored.

2: NODE_ENV environment variable is not set at all

If you get something similar to this error when starting Butler SOS, it usually means that you've forgotten to set the NODE_ENV environment variable.

Please see this page for more information.

C:\tool\butler-sos-5.6.2\src>node butler-sos.js
WARNING: No configurations found in configuration directory:C:\tool\butler-sos-5.6.2\src\config
WARNING: To disable this warning set SUPPRESS_NO_CONFIG_WARNING in the environment.
C:\tool\butler-sos-5.6.2\src\node_modules\config\lib\config.js:182
    throw new Error('Configuration property "' + property + '" is not defined');
    ^

Error: Configuration property "Butler-SOS.logLevel" is not defined