Run statsd as a daemon on EC2 instances programatically - amazon-elastic-beanstalk

Question

EDIT: My goal is to be able to emit metrics from my spring-boot application and have them sent to a Graphite server. For that I am trying to set up statsd. If you can suggest a cleaner approach, that would be better.
I have a Beanstalk application which requires statsd to run as a background process. I was able to specify commands and packages through ebextensions config file as follows:
packages:
yum:
git: []
commands:
01_nodejs_install:
command: sudo yum -y install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel
ignoreErrors: true
02_mkdir_statsd:
command: mkdir /home/ec2-user/statsd
03_fetch_statsd:
command: git clone https://github.com/etsy/statsd.git /home/ec2-user/statsd
ignoreErrors: true
04_run_statsd:
command: node stats.js exampleConfig.js
cwd: /home/ec2-user/statsd
When I try to deploy the application to a new environment, the EC2 node never comes up fully. I logged in to check what might be going on and noticed in /var/log/cfn-init.log that 01_nodejs_install, 02_mkdir_statsd and 03_fetch_statsd were executed successfully. So I guess the system was stuck on the fourth command (04_run_statsd).
2016-05-24 01:25:09,769 [INFO] Yum installed [u'git']
2016-05-24 01:25:37,751 [INFO] Command 01_nodejs_install succeeded
2016-05-24 01:25:37,755 [INFO] Command 02_mkdir_statsd succeeded
2016-05-24 01:25:38,700 [INFO] Command 03_fetch_statsd succeeded
cfn-init.log (END)
I need help with the following:
If there is a better way to install and run statsd while instantiating an environment, I would appreciate if you could provide details on that approach. This current scheme seems hacky.
If this is the approach I need to stick with, how can I run the fourth command so that statsd can be run as a background process?

Answer 1

Tried a few things and found that the following ebextensions configs work:
packages:
yum:
git: []
commands:
01_nodejs_install:
command: sudo yum -y install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel
ignoreErrors: true
02_mkdir_statsd:
command: mkdir /home/ec2-user/statsd
03_fetch_statsd:
command: git clone https://github.com/etsy/statsd.git /home/ec2-user/statsd
ignoreErrors: true
04_change_config:
command: cat exampleConfig.js | sed 's/2003/<graphite server port>/g' | sed 's/graphite.example.com/my.graphite.server.hostname/g' > config.js
cwd: /home/ec2-user/statsd
05_run_statsd:
command: setsid node stats.js config.js >/dev/null 2>&1 < /dev/null &
cwd: /home/ec2-user/statsd
Note that I added another command (04_change_config) so that I may configure my own Graphite server and port in statsd configs. This change is not needed to address the original question, though.
The actual run command uses setsid to run the command as a daemon.