Meteor Up

Production Quality Meteor Deployments

Meteor Up (mup for short) is a command line tool that allows you to deploy any Meteor app to your own server. It supports any Open Solaris or Debian/Ubuntu 12.04 or higher servers.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Server Configuration
• Installation
• Creating a Meteor Up Project
• Example File
• Setting Up a Server
  • Server Setup Details
• Deploying an App
  • Deploy Wait Time
  • Multiple Deployment Targets
• Access Logs
• Reconfiguring & Restarting
• Accessing the Database
• Multiple Deployments
• Multiple OS Support
• Binary NPM Modules
• Troubleshooting

Features

• Single command server setup
• Single command deployment
• Environmental Variables management
• Support for settings.json
• Password or Private Key(pem) based server authentication
• Access, logs from the terminal (supports log tailing)
• Support for multiple meteor deployments

Server Configuration

• Auto-Restart if the app crashed (using forever)
• Auto-Start after the server reboot (using upstart)
• Stepdown User Privileges
• Revert to the previous version, if the deployment failed
• Secured MongoDB Installation (Optional)
• Pre-Installed PhantomJS (Optional)

Installation

npm install -g mup

If you are looking for password-based authentication, you need to install sshpass on your local development machine.

Creating a Meteor Up Project

mkdir ~/my-meteor-deployment
cd ~/my-meteor-deployment
mup init

This will create two files in your Meteor Up project directory:

• mup.json - Meteor Up configuration file
• settings.json - Settings for Meteor's settings API

mup.json is commented and easy to follow (it supports JavaScript comments).

Example File

{
  // Server authentication info
  "servers": [
    {
      "host": "hostname",
      "username": "root",
      "password": "password"
      // or pem file (ssh based authentication)
      // WARNING: Keys protected by a passphrase are not supported
      //"pem": "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
      // Also, for non-standard ssh port use this
      //"sshOptions": { "Port" : 49154 }
    }
  ],

  // Install MongoDB on the server. Does not destroy the local MongoDB on future setups
  "setupMongo": true,

  // WARNING: Node.js is required! Only skip if you already have Node.js installed on server.
  "setupNode": true,

  // WARNING: nodeVersion defaults to 0.10.28 if omitted. Do not use v, just the version number.
  "nodeVersion": "0.10.28",

  // Install PhantomJS on the server
  "setupPhantom": true,

  // Application name (no spaces)
  "appName": "meteor",

  // Location of app (local directory)
  "app": "/Users/arunoda/Meteor/my-app",

  // Configure environment
  "env": {
    "PORT": 80,
    "ROOT_URL": "http://myapp.com",
    "MONGO_URL": "mongodb://arunoda:fd8dsjsfh7@hanso.mongohq.com:10023/MyApp",
    "MAIL_URL": "smtp://postmaster%40myapp.mailgun.org:adj87sjhd7s@smtp.mailgun.org:587/"
  },

  // Meteor Up checks if the app comes online just after the deployment.
  // Before mup checks that, it will wait for the number of seconds configured below.
  "deployCheckWaitTime": 15
}

Setting Up a Server

mup setup

This will setup the server for the mup deployments. It will take around 2-5 minutes depending on the server's performance and network availability.

Ssh based authentication

Please ensure your key file (pem) is not protected by a passphrase. Also the setup process will require NOPASSWD access to sudo. (Since Meteor needs port 80, sudo access is required.)

You can add your user to the sudo group:

sudo adduser *username*  sudo

And you also need to add NOPASSWD to the sudoers file:

sudo visudo

# replace this line
%sudo  ALL=(ALL) ALL

# by this line
%sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL  

When this process is not working you might encounter the following error:

'sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified'

Server Setup Details

This is how Meteor Up will configure the server for you based on the given appName or using "meteor" as default appName. This information will help you customize the server for your needs.

• your app lives at /opt/<appName>/app
• mup uses upstart with a config file at /etc/init/<appName>.conf
• you can start and stop the app with upstart: start <appName> and stop <appName>
• logs are located at: /var/log/upstart/app.log
• MongoDB installed and bound to the local interface (cannot access from the outside)
• the database is named <appName>

For more information see lib/taskLists.js.

Deploying an App

mup deploy

This will bundle the Meteor project and deploy it to the server.

Deploy Wait Time

Meteor Up checks if the deployment is successful or not just after the deployment. By default, it will wait 10 seconds before the check. You can configure the wait time with the deployCheckWaitTime option in the mup.json.

Multiple Deployment Targets

You can use an array to deploy to multiple servers at once.

To deploy to different environments (e.g. staging, production, etc.), use separate Meteor Up configurations in separate directories, with each directory containing separate mup.json and settings.json files, and the mup.json files' app field pointing back to your app's local directory.

Custom Meteor Binary

Sometimes, you might be using mrt, or Meteor from a git checkout. By default, Meteor Up uses meteor. You can ask Meteor Up to use the correct binary with the meteorBinary option.

{
  ...
  "meteorBinary": "~/bin/meteor/meteor"
  ...
}

Access Logs

mup logs -f

Mup can tail logs from the server and supports all the options of tail.

Reconfiguring & Restarting

After you've edit environmental variables or settings.json, you can reconfigure the app without deploying again. Use the following command for that.

mup reconfig

This will also restart the app, so you can use it for that purpose even if you haven't changed the configuration file.

Accessing the Database

You can't access the MongoDB from the outside the server. To access the MongoDB shell you need to log into your server via SSH first and then run the following command:

mongo appName

Multiple OS Support

Meteor UP supports multiple operating systems:

• linux - Any Ubuntu/Debian based OS
• sunos - Open Solaris based OS (i.e: SmartOS)

All you have to do is specify the type of os (default linux if omitted) when defining the server info:

{
  "servers": [
    {
      "host": "my-linux-box",
      "username": "root",
      "password": "password"
    },
    {
      "host": "my-solaris-box",
      "username": "root",
      "password": "password",
      "os": "sunos"
    }
  ],
}

Multiple Deployments

Meteor Up supports multiple deployments to a single server. Meteor Up only does the deployment; if you need to configure subdomains, you need to manually setup a reverse proxy yourself.

Let's assume, we need to deploy production and staging versions of the app to the same server. The production app runs on port 80 and the staging app runs on port 8000.

We need to have two separate Meteor Up projects. For that, create two directories and initialize Meteor Up and add the necessary configurations.

In the staging mup.json, add a field called appName with the value staging. You can add any name you prefer instead of staging. Since we are running our staging app on port 8000, add an environment variable called PORT with the value 8000.

Now setup both projects and deploy as you need.

Binary NPM Modules

If you are using binary npm modules either with meteor-npm or with some other package you can't deploy and run your app by default. That's because binaries in the bundle are not compatible with your deployment environment.

So, you need to specify in mup.json the binary modules and which packages they are in.

{
  ...

  "binaryNpmModules": {
    "meteor-package-name": ["npm-module1", "npm-module2"]
  }

  ...
}

Troubleshooting

If you need to see the output of meteor-up (to see more precisely where it's failing or hanging, for example), run it like so:

DEBUG=* mup <command>

where <command> is one of the mup commands such as setup, deploy, etc.