I’ve gotten a ton of 502 errors and related issues that crop up when deploying the Beanstalk. One of the issues that cropped up a few times recently, until I stumbled into a working solution was the 502 NGINX error. I went digging around and ended up just trying to deploy a default, fresh from the ‘express newAppNameHere’ creation and still got the error.

I went digging through the Beanstalk configuration for the app and found this little tidbit.

I’ve pointed out the section where I’ve added the command.
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
node ./bin/www
[/sourcecode]

Based on the commands that are executed normally, it seems `npm start` would work work to get the application started. But I have surmised the issue is that the commands are executed sequentially;

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
node server.js
node app.js
npm start
[/sourcecode]

When these are executed in order, errors crop up and the command that should work `npm start` begins with a corrupted and error laden beginning. Leaving the application not running. However by adding the `node ./bin/www` to the text box all the others are skipped and this command is issued, resulting in a running application.

The other thing is to follow the now standard approach of just issue `npm start`, but being sure to replace what I put in the text box above (`node ./bin/www`) with `npm start` so that beanstalk only runs npm start instead of the ordered execution.