Ember-deploy

An Ember-CLI Addon for Lightning Fast Deployments of Ember-CLI Apps

This project includes the necessary commands for 'Lightning Fast Deployments of Ember-CLI Apps'. The whole workflow is heavily inspired by Luke Melia's talk about Lightning Fast Deployment(s) of Rails-backed Javascript Apps.

Workflow

Please watch Luke's Talk before using this project!

The TL;DR of the talk is that you want to serve your bootstrap index.html that Ember-CLI builds for you from a Key-Value store via your Backend and serve the rest of your assets from a static file hoster like for example S3. This is a sketch of what this Addon gives you ripped out of Luke's talk slides:

A deployment consists of multiple steps:

1. Build your assets for production via ember build --environment production
2. Upload assets to S3.
3. Upload your bootstrap index.html to a key-value store.
4. Activate the uploaded index.html as the default revision your users will get served from your backend.

Commands

This Ember-CLI Addon adds multiple deployment related tasks to your Ember-CLI App.

• ember deploy:assets Uploads your production assets to a static file hoster. Currently only S3 is supported.
• ember deploy:index Uploads a bootstrap index.html to a key-value store. Currently only redis is supported.
• ember deploy:list Lists all currently uploaded revisions of bootstrap index.html files in your key-value store.
• ember deploy:activate Activates an uploaded revision. This will set the <your-project-name>:current revision to the passed revision. <your-project-name>:current is the revision you will serve your users as default.
• ember deploy This commands builds your ember application, uploads it to your file hoster and uploads it to your key value store in one step.

You can pass --environment <some-environment> to every command. If you don't pass an environment explicitly ember-deploy will use the development-environment.

Config file

ember-deploy expects a deploy.json file in the root of your Ember-CLI app directory. In this file you tell ember-deploy about the necessary credentials for your file hoster and for your key-value store. An Example could look like this:

{
  "development": {
    "store": {
      "host": "localhost",
      "port": 6379
    },
    "assets": {
      "accessKeyId": "<your-access-key-goes-here>",
      "secretAccessKey": "<your-secret-access-key-goes-here>",
      "bucket": "<your-bucket-name>"
    }
  },

  "staging": {
    "store": {
      "host": "staging-redis.example.com",
      "port": 6379
    },
    "assets": {
      "accessKeyId": "<your-access-key-goes-here>",
      "secretAccessKey": "<your-secret-access-key-goes-here>",
      "bucket": "<your-bucket-name>"
    }
  }
}

You have to have an entry for every environment you want to use in this file.

How to use

This is an example of how one would use this addon to deploy an ember-cli app:

• ember deploy --environment production
• ember deploy:list --environment production (this will print out a list of revisions)
• ember activate --revision ember-deploy:44f2f92 --environment production

Asset uploads

ember-deploy sets the correct cache headers for you. Currently these are hard coded to a two year cache period. Assets are also gzipped before uploading to S3. This should be enough to cache aggressively and you should not run into problems due to ember-cli's fingerprinting support. I will try to add more configuration options for caching in the near future.

Tooling

ember-deploy is pretty opinionated right now. It only supports redis as its key-value store and expects you to use S3 for hosting your assets.

Internally ember-deploy uses my deployinator project to upload to a key-value store. Deployinator is built around the idea of adapters which should make it easy to add other key-value stores if you have the need for them.

S3 as a hosting provider is built into ember-deploy itself but this also should be changed to some kind of adapter in the near future. Unfortunately right now you will need to use S3.

Example Sinatra app

This is a small sinatra application that can be used to serve an Ember-CLI application deployed with the help of ember-deploy.

require 'sinatra'  
require 'redis'

def bootstrap_index(index_key)  
  redis = Redis.new
  index_key ||= redis.get('<your-project-name>:current')
  redis.get(index_key)
end

get '/' do  
  content_type 'text/html'
  bootstrap_index(params[:index_key])
end  

The nice thing about this is that you can deploy your app to production, test it out by passing an index_key parameter with the revision you want to test and activate when you feel confident that everything is working as expected.