DEPLOYMENT.md

Deployment

This is a small walkthrough on publishing your app in some popular PaaS providers.

Contents

• Heroku
• App Engine
• Elastic Beanstalk on AWS

Heroku

Log in to Heroku or create a new account if you don't have one.

Then you'll need to install the Heroku CLI on your machine. The previous link has detailed instructions.

Create a new app from the dropdown "New" on the top right of Heroku's dashboard screen. Give your app a name and select its servers' location.

Heroku uses Yarn to install and run npm scripts by default (if it detects a yarn.lock file). Unfortunately Yarn has an outstanding issue that makes it hard to build production using it, so we'll need to use npm instead.

Create a .slugignore file at the root of your repo and add yarn.lock:

touch .slugignore
echo 'yarn.lock' >> .slugignore

Then check the file into git. This will instruct Heroku to use npm for all builds and commands (relevant documentation).

On the "Deploy" tab of your new app, under "Deploy using Heroku Git", you will find all the instructions you need:

Log in to your Heroku account via the Heroku CLI:

heroku login

Initialize your git repository with Heroku:

heroku git:remote -a your-apps-name

Deploy your application:

git push heroku master

And you're done! Your app should be running at https://your-apps-name.herokuapp.com/.

Relevant documentation on Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs

App Engine

Log in to Google Cloud Platform or create an account if you don't have one.

Then you'll need to install the Google Cloud SDK in your local machine.

Authorize gcloud to access Google Cloud Platform with:

gcloud auth login

You will be asked to enter your Google account's credentials in a new browser window. Relevant Documentation

After you've done this create an app.yaml file at your project's root with the following contents:

runtime: nodejs
env: flex
# Temporary setting to keep gcloud from uploading node_modules
skip_files:
 - ^node_modules$

Check it into git and then deploy your app:

gcloud app deploy

As an extra step, add the following script to your package.json scripts:

"deploy": "gcloud app deploy app.yaml --version=`echo $(date +%Y%m%dt%H%M%S)-$(git rev-parse HEAD | cut -c1-7)`"

Then deploy with:

yarn run deploy (or npm run deploy)

The above script will provide more reasonable versioning naming containing the date (Y-m-d-H-M-S) and the hash of your most current commit.

And you're done! Your app should be running at https://your-project-id.appspot.com

Relevant documentation on GCP: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/quickstart

Elastic Beanstalk on AWS

Login to AWS or create a new account if you don't have one. You should securely store the keys you get from Amazon's IAM service, you'll need them later. How you handle security and authorization is not part of this small guide; you should follow AWS's best practices and authorize with a new IAM user with limited permissions.

Install AWS's Elastic Beanstalk CLI on your local machine.

Then initialize EB CLI, at the root of your project:

eb init

This will prompt you with a set of questions about the project, after you auth your account by providing your access ID and secret key.

Relevant docs for eb init: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb3-init.html.

After succesfully creating your EB project, create the environment:

eb create your-desired-environment-name -d

This will create a new environment and deploy all your code to your EB project. Here's some more info on how to customize the environment via the create command: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb3-create.html. For example, you can set your environmental variables in one go with --envvars.

Now if you need to deploy new updates simply run:

eb deploy

And you're done!

Note that all the above steps can be done via AWS's web interface as well but the EB CLI provides with a much simpler process.