Deploying our app

By now, our app looks okay and works reasonably well. But we were still stuck on local testing, meaning that we couldn’t test it on mobile platforms to see what it rendered.

Thus, we decided to deploy our app.

Hosting our app #

As NodeJS is getting a wider and wider audience, more and more hosting services have emerged, the choice is now huge.

We settled on Nodejistu, but we could have used others, like Heroku or Joyent.

Nodejitsu has a great client for deploying node apps (more about that later), and offers 20$ for new users, which is enough to host our app for this course.

Moreover, Nodejitsu has partnerships with databases providers (we used MongoLab) that allowed us to bootstrap MongoDB very quickly.

Deploying our app #

Here is the best part : deploying a node app in incredibly easy. We have been baffled by how fast and straightforward it was.

We used Nodejitsu’s jitsu command line interface and it only took four steps

• Step 1. Install jitsu using npm : npm install jitsu -g
• Step 2. Login : jitsu login
• Step 3. Get to the app directory : cd ~/Documents/Shawt
• Step 4. Deploy the app : jitsu deploy

And that’s it. The app is online.

And when we have changes we want to push, we just have to deploy it again.

One more reason to enjoy Node ;)