Amazon deployment

[nschurmann]

Is there a plan to build a command line that deploys and rollbacks to amazon web services?, that would be super useful.

[JaKXz]

I would find this useful too. @nschurmann would you happen to have an implementation you could put into a PR?

[nschurmann]

@JaKXz i don't have an implementation, actually i'm trying to deploy the app into a debian server without any success.

[remicastaing]

Have you take a look at this: https://github.com/bevacqua/grunt-ec2?

[nschurmann]

@remicastaing looks good, my only doubt is that this lib uses pm2 to keep it running, how you should put this together?

[remicastaing]

Absolutely no idea! I just googled it to find if someone else already wrote something to deploy apps with grunt on ec2.

[nschurmann]

@JaKXz for now my deployment strategy is mainly using git.
Just code as you always do and when you need to deploy go into de server, do a pull to a specific commit (the production branch) and then start testing, if something goes wrong then you can make a rollback to a specific commit that used to work.

[nschurmann]

Of course this is the manual process, an automated process should be a script or command line tool that logins to your amazon ec2 instance, navigate to the folder, make a backup, pull latest changes.

And also receive a command that can make a rollback (get into server, navigate to folder, put back the backup).

[nschurmann]

I was missing the command that kept the application, after some time googling i found that this:

nohup grunt serve:dist --force &

works quite well. The --force param is needed because there is no desktop environment (because is a server) and prevents from failing at the very end.
nohup is for no hangup and the & is for running in background.

If you still don't recover the control of the command line just press enter, it should do the trick.

[thomporter]

I haven no ec2/node experience (yet,) but this article describes a method using forever, which is a nice node module for keeping your app alive. There is another one here and more by googling "ec2 node forever"

[nschurmann]

@thomporter you know how to use this with servers launched with grunt?

[thomporter]

You won't launch the server with grunt this way. You should only be using grunt to launch your server for development. In production, grunt will just get in the way..

But, I believe this is the core command you'd need:

cd /path/to/server/folder/ && forever start app.js 

Let me know if that helps. If not, I might try setting up an ec2 instance myself and see if I can't get the demo project running on it.

P.S You'll need to install forever globally first: npm install -g forever

[thomporter]

I was able to get our demo app running on an ec2 instance will fairly little hassle...

http://ec2-54-68-53-8.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:8080/

I used the Ubuntu ec2 instance.
Once in, I setup a few things. First, I created a new user "appuser" to run the app as and setup my public key:

sudo adduser appuser --system --disabled-password --group --shell /bin/bash
cd /home/appuser
mkdir .ssh
cd .ssh
echo "--paste your public key here--" >> authorized_keys
chmod 600 authorized_keys

I also installed mongo, ruby & sass

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb ruby
gem install sass

Then I logged into the server as the app user, and installed NVM:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.15.0/install.sh | bash

Next I setup node:

nvm install v0.10.31
nvm default v0.10.31

Then I installed yo & forever, and our generator:

npm install -g yo forever generator-angular-fullstack

Next I built a simple app:

mkdir ~/app && cd $_ && yo angular-fullstack

I built it with everything, though I didn't actually setup the passport stuff for 3rd parties, not sure why I even enabled them, but I did. =)

Next I setup my environment:

export NODE_ENV="production"

I built the app:

grunt build

Lastly, I launched it:

cd dist
forever server/app.js &

The & at the end tells the process to run in the background, so I can log out even and it will keep running.

[remicastaing]

Well, but @thomporter you didn't deploy an app on ec2, you build an app from scratch on an ec2 instance.

For openshift, the generator help to build an app locally and then help to deploy it on an openshift gear.

[thomporter]

Shouldn't be a problem. Build your app locally and just copy the dist
folder up to the server...