Deploy-meteor-on-openshift

You know it all, deploying on .meteor.com is no more possible. So if you need to deploy your Meteor application on a free Paas , OpenShift could be a great alternative.

Note ! : This repository and work is based on the great atricle written by Tutas-labs.

Introduction

OpenShift is a Paas provided by RedHat. The free plan gives you 3 gears with 1G of disk space.

It does not provide official support for Meteor for the moment by it allows you to create your own.

1. Create your OpenShift application

The first thing to do is to create an application on OpenShift. You need to use Do-It-Yourself 0.1 which is a boileprate you can customize to make it support Meteor. Openshift creates a Git repository that you will clone on your machine to commit your Meteor app bundle on it.

Then, you need to add the following 'cartidiges' :

• MongoDB 2.4
• Cron 1.4 : to lunch recurent tasks like checking application state
• If your Meteor application uses Spiderable package to make it SEO friendly, you need PhantomJS to be installed with your Openshift application. Openshift does not provide it as cartidige, but it allows you to insall it via a URL,we will use this one : https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daniel-sc/casperjs-cartridge/master/metadata/manifest.yml

2. Clone your Openshift Repo on your machine

You need to clone the repo on your machine, we will use for this guide app-deploy as the name for the directory on our machine.

git clone YOUR_REPO_URL app-deploy

The initial content of the repo is the following :

ls -al

.git/
.openshift/
README.md
diy/
misc/

Delete .openshift/ , README.md , diy/ and misc/

3. Clone this repo on your machine

You need to clone this repo on your machine to copy its content on app-deploy directory ( except .git/ directory ), we will use for this guide app-diy as name.

git clone https://github.com/nabiltntn/deploy-meteor-on-openshift.git app-diy

Copy all the content of app-diy ( except .git/ folder ) on app-deploy

CD to app-deploy and install dependencies :

npm install

Your can after that delete app-diy if you want.

4. Create a bash script on your Meteor app directory and copy/paste this script

We will give it push.sh as name.

#!/bin/sh
# this assumes you created the openshift directory in your home directory
# modify the script if this is not the case

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
  then
    echo "Error : you need to precise the path to your application local repo as first argument"
    exit 0
fi

DEPLOY_PROJECT_FOLDER=$1
TODAY=`date +%d-%m-%Y`
APP_NAME=${PWD##*/}
BUNDLE_NAME=${APP_NAME}.tar.gz
BUNDLE_EXTRACT_FOLDER="bundle"

echo "-> App local Git repo directory to use : $1 "
echo '-> Start building the application'

meteor build ${DEPLOY_PROJECT_FOLDER}

cd ${DEPLOY_PROJECT_FOLDER}

echo "-> Delete the old $BUNDLE_EXTRACT_FOLDER folder to prepare extract"
rm -rf ${BUNDLE_EXTRACT_FOLDER}

echo "-> Clean repo from deleted files"
git rm -r ${BUNDLE_EXTRACT_FOLDER}

echo '-> Start extracting the application bundle to deploy project folder'
tar -xvf ${BUNDLE_NAME} ${BUNDLE_EXTRACT_FOLDER}

echo '-> Delete the generated bundle'
rm ${BUNDLE_NAME}

echo '-> Generate app_packages_npm_deps file containing the list of app packages NPM dependencies to use in app build'
node loadNpmModules.js > app_packages_npm_deps

echo '-> Create a file with last deploy date ( also to force deploy even if nothing changed )'
date -u > last_build_date

echo '-> Commit new version to local repo'
git add .
git commit -am "Deploy ${APP_NAME} on ${TODAY}"

echo '-> Push new bundle to app remote Repo on openshift'
git push

This script will do the following :

• Checks if we pass the path the your local Openshift app repo , for this guide the path to app-deploy
• Builds your Meteor application
• Extracts application bundle to app-deploy in bundle directory
• Generates app_packages_npm_deps file that contains all the NPM modules required by your Meteor application packages ( if they depend on ) instead of 'guessing' them. This file will be used to install required NPM modules for your Openshift application while bootstraping.
• Commits all modifications to your local app-deploy
• Pushs the app to remote Openshift app to install/update it and restart

And !!

To deploy, CD to your Meteor application and exectue push.sh with the path to app-deploy

./push.sh (path to `app-deploy`)

If you want to deploy a new version of the application, you dont have to repeat all the previous steps. Just execute the last command.

Notes

• For this guide, i copied a settings.json file settings-prod.json under private directory in my Meteor application. During the build process, this file is copied under app-deploy/bundle/programs/server/assets/app/settings-prod.json If your application uses a different name, then you have to indicate it in app-deploy/.openshift/actions_hooks/start file.
• To access application logs, your need to use Openshift rhc client and use the rhc tail APPLICATION_NAME command. The application generates two files : app_log.log and app_err.log
• If your openshift application uses custom domain name, you can change ROOT_URL env variable in app-deploy\meteorshim.js

process.env.ROOT_URL = "http://YOUR_CUSTOM_DOMAIN" || "http://localhost";