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Deploying using now

You can deploy your midterm project using a neat little utility called now.

To get started, install both the desktop client and the command line application.

Desktop Client

  1. Visit https://zeit.co/download
  2. Click Download Now
  3. Create an account (you will need to verify your email address)

Command Line Client

  1. Run sudo npm install now -g to install. If that doesn't work, try running sudo npm install now -g --unsafe-perm.
  2. Run now --login and authenticate yourself using the same email.

How to Deploy

Navigate to an exising project, open up package.json.

You should already have a script key that looks like this:

"scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},

We want to add one more command called start to tell now what command to use to start our server.

"scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "start": "node index.js" /* Add this */
},

Now simply run now deploy.

That's literally it. You should have a link copied to your clipboard. Paste it into your browser, and view your live application!

Enviroment Variables

One really cool feature of now is the ability to view the source code of a live website. If you append /_src/ to the URL, you can view all of the server-side files.

BUT we don't want to display our enviroment variables. So instead of putting it in our .env file (which is now public to everyone), we run:

now deploy -e MONGODB="mongo url here"

Or, if you want to use the .env file as is, run:

now deploy --dotenv

And it will turn your .env file into a -e command automatically.

Deploying using Heroku

Visit the Heroku website here: https://www.heroku.com/ and register for an account.

Go to your dashboard page and in the top right corner there should be a New button, click on it and select Create new app.

Name your new application. This will be what users will enter into the url to get to your application. You can change this later in the Settings tab of that project later. quotes-server-wow

After confirming, you should be in the Deploy tab. From here, go down to the Deployment Method section and choose the GitHub option. Connect your github account in the Connect to GitHub section. After doing so, choose the GitHub repository that you want to deploy from.

If you wish to have Heroku automatically deploy, choose the Enable Automatic Deploys option. The Choose a branch to deploy option essentially entails where Heroku will listen for updates to your application. We will stick with the master branch for now. Now, whenever you push a commit to the master branch, Heroku will automatically update your application.

Note: You may need to manaully deploy from time to time. You can find the option to do so at the very bottom in the Manual deploy section.

index.js Changes

Notice how in our index.js we originally had:

app.listen(3000, function() {
    console.log('Listening!');
});

This tells our local instance to listen on a specific port that we want assigned to it. Since this is our local machine we can designate our application to preoccupy a certain port. Now when we are deploying, the deployment service will instead assign a port to the end user since not all applications can run on port 3000. So we need to change our code to compensate for that:

app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, function() {
    console.log('Listening!');
});

This tells our server to either use a port that the environment provides or we statically assign one.