Dave Ghijben dghijben

Deploying a node app with Forever is great...until your server restarts unexpectedly. Then your app stops running and you have to re-deploy.

To get around this, we're going to run our node app as an Upstart service. Upstart services are great, because, once started, the system auto-restarts them if they fail, or if the server restarts.

###Step 1: Create a service for your node app

ssh in as root ssh root@youripaddress
Create a node-app.conf file in /etc/init
IMPORTANT: whatever filename you pick is what you will use to start|stop|restart your service i.e. service node-app start

##Setup your server (this would ideally be done with automated provisioning)

add a deploy user with password-less ssh see this gist
install forever npm install -g forever

##Install flightplan

npm install -g flightplan
in your project folder npm install flightplan --save-dev
create a flightplan.js file

Deploy your own PaaS!

Setting up Dokku with DigitalOcean and Namecheap

..or how I made my own heroku in a few hours for $3.98.

This write-up owes a great deal to dscape's Node.js Deployments with Docker, Dokku, & Digital Ocean, the dokku project itself, and the fine folks working on dokku's issues. I took dscape's article as a starting point when trying this out but found some details lacking so I documented my own process for getting dokku up and running.

1. Get a domain

Deploying Yeoman apps to Heroku

Prerequisites

This assumes you already have a Yeoman app and are ready for publishing

Build for Production

Create production directory & assets

Vagrant Setup

This tutorial guides you through creating your first Vagrant project.

We start with a generic Ubuntu VM, and use the Chef provisioning tool to:

install packages for vim, git
create user accounts, as specified in included JSON config files
install specified user dotfiles (.bashrc, .vimrc, etc) from a git repository

Afterwards, we'll see how easy it is to package our newly provisioned VM

###Let's install Vagrant###

Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/
Install Vagrant: http://vagrantup.com/

###Select a Vagrant Box from https://vagrantcloud.com###

#add it to your list of boxes
vagrant box add hashicorp/precise32
#create a new folder for your project &amp; init vagrant

###Let's install Vagrant###

Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/
Install Vagrant: http://vagrantup.com/

###Select a Vagrant Box from https://vagrantcloud.com###

#add it to your list of boxes
vagrant box add hashicorp/precise32
#create a new folder for your project &amp; init vagrant

	$base-font-size: 16px;
	$base-line-height: 1.5;

	// this value may vary for each font
	// unitless value relative to 1em
	$cap-height: 0.68;


	@mixin baseline($font-size, $scale: 2) {

	<div ng-app="wizardApp">
	<div ng-controller="WizardSignupController">
	<h2>Signup wizard</h2>
	<div ui-view></div>
	</div>
	</div>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/vendor/angular-ui-router/release/angular-ui-router.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	angular.module('wizardApp', [
	'ui.router',

	angular.module('myApp',
	['ngRoute', 'myApp.services', 'myApp.directives']
	)
	.config(function(AWSServiceProvider) {
	AWSServiceProvider.setArn('arn:aws:iam::<ACCOUNT_ID>:role/google-web-role');
	})
	.config(function(StripeServiceProvider) {
	StripeServiceProvider.setPublishableKey('pk_test_YOURKEY');
	})
	.config(function($routeProvider) {