Over the weekend, @mazlix and I wrote a CLI tool that allows you to deploy a Meteor app using the ZEIT’s deployment service called now. We’re calling it meteor-now.
The idea behind it is to bring back the easy deployment solution we had back when meteor deploy was around. Once you’re set up, you should be able to deploy you app simply by running meteor-now.
That looks great. I particularly like the ability to switch a deployment from development -> staging -> production with 0 downtime.
Only issue I can see with Now is they’ve totally hidden where your app will be deployed and on what it will be deployed. They list it as a feature but I’d still like to know
Dynamic
We don’t under-allocate or over-allocate resources. You don’t have to ever adjust any knobs, configure instances or set up processes.
Multi-cloud.
We don’t depend on a single specific cloud provider, but abstract them instead. This means that we can always find the best combination of cost, performance, reliability and resistance to failure or censorship.
As mentioned below/in article mlab.com is a great resource. We’re also looking into providing free not-suitable for production mongoDB instances on deploy, so if you’re just testing something out or showing something off you can just meteor-now with no extra params and have something working.
Can you point me on how to use the free tier in mLab? I created an account there but after that I don’t know what to do next =) I’d like to deploy my open-source project using zier and mLab
Hey all, just wanted to give everyone an update on meteor-now. Our latest release is out and you can now deploy your meteor app with an included MongoDB instance just like meteor deploy used to do!
You just have to run the command meteor-now in your project folder and it’ll deploy. I wrote about it in this medium post.
If you like the tool, give us an upvote over at Hacker News when you get a chance.
this is seriously awesome, your work is appreciated! I loved the meteor deploy days for sending quick prototypes to designer or non-technical friends who didn’t want to deal with git clone && meteor
Does the data persist? I know that ‘now’ advocated against DBs and data persistence from the very beginning. Indeed they’re recommending using a DBaaS instead.
The current implementation has not been tested on windows yet and I doubt it will work due to a specific step when we prepare the build for upload that relies on the split command. However, we’ll be working towards windows support as well.
That’s right @ric0, ZEIT does not recommend using their service for database services and in fact they block you from exposing your database to the outside world. However, in our case the Meteor app connects locally to the MongoDB instance installed in the container. This is great in that you’ll have a separate MongoDB with every deployment you do when you don’t specify a -e MONGO_URL=.... It woks well for demo apps and mvps. But no, at the moment the data is not guaranteed to persistent.
This is something we’ve clearly indicated on the README as well as a warning when you deploy using meteor-now without specifying a -e MONGO_URL=.... I’ve also created an issue on the now repo to find out if users can turn off scaling on a specific deployment and I’ve been told that scaling customizations are coming so in the future this may not even be a problem but for now just be aware of it.
but I’d still like to know 
