I’ve been running mission-critical production apps on Meteor since version 0.6. ‘Real’ lives are supported. (We have eight employees now,) I knew going in that it was all going to be changing radically. We faced lots of problems along the way. If I could go back and start over I’d choose Meteor again.
What’s so hard about deployment? We use Galaxy now, but there are lower cost solution like Heroku and Modulus. Hardly took me 5 minutes to deploy to Modulus. Heroku took a little longer, but not much longer.
Hm … our experiences are different … no pain at all for now. We are using different types of VPS or Hardware server as production servers. All are running Ubuntu Core / Server 14.04 LTS and the node from meteor dev_bundle.
We just install iptables (always the same script), nginx as front-end proxy and mongo from OS or on ARM boards also from meteor dev_bundle.
We have installed meteor on the live servers as well and doing all through a hook-script on git.
Our deployment is running by pushing the changes to the “live” branch. The hook makes the pull and runs the build on our live server. With that we are sure, that we got the consistence environment on that machine (libc, +++).
We just have defined an “update-bash” script in addition, that gets started by the hook after build process to make updates or whatever outside from the meteor app.
Woah there seems to be a lot of attraction for CI with Meteor here. That’s awesome! I’ll create a new thread outside this thread with my setup and notify you guys when it’s done. It’s gonna be really long though as I want you to understand every bit of the workflow in detail, as that’s crucial if you ever want to customize it - so brace for that!
This is your second mention of a passenger problem, yet you don’t provide any clue to what it is. Perhaps if you elaborated on that?
I’ve been using passenger for a long time now on multiple servers with varying sizes and I love its simplicity, the density it provides and its scaling abilities. Never ever had a problem that was actually a passenger problem. They are also very responsive to their github issues and the documentation is also great.
And you also mention you seek a startup discount from passenger. Man, it is free. If you are eyeing the enterprise version, it is $29, again, basically free.
Here it is, I’m super tired and really have to get some sleep. I missed some parts and will fill in tomorrow, but it should keep you occupied for a while: Continious Integration with Meteor
I worked on the Passenger problem in other threads. The problem wasn’t with passenger ultimately. It was a Meteor app ( very simple ) that that runs great under “meteor” but doesn’t run at all after “build” or “demeteorizer” … because of incompatibilities and version control.
It wasn’t Passenger. It was the state of my meteor education.
I’m not a dev-ops person … I understood individual elements of what you said, but not the totality. If something went wrong with your system and I was the only one left to fix it … I wouldn’t call that a “production” system with 'production" level safe guards.
Am I wrong to think that “production” quality deployment for Meteor sucks currently ?
I assume you say, yes. I’m wrong.
In my opinion Meteor deployment is either a Black Art at this time, meaning … you can do it and I cannot … or it’s expensive as hell … or it’s grossly limiting … aka … “Meteor Deploy”.
I didn’t really have any other questions … but I’ve received a lot of great comments, pointers and advice.
I will read them all and learn and continue my Meteor journey.
We have different opinions about the definition of the word free.
Although, I’m not religious about this but people in the US or Europe have different opportunities than people in Asia/India or Africa.
These technologies could help a lot of people and many … the Bottom Billion … could benefit … but not at $29 a month. That’s a fortune in some countries.
Meteor does not allow everyone (non-dev-ops and non-technicals) automatically to deploy their apps into full production on any server provider worldwide (free, low-cost)
Hmm @SkinnyGeek1010 … I do not agree to you … In any environment you will find the guys doing well with all parts of their stacks: dev, debug, testing, automation, deployment, scaling, backup, … and of course you find those doing not.
Yep I agree with that. Also I could have phrased it a bit better too… It just feels like the Meteor community is a lot less focused on testing and code quality compared to others that i’ve been a part of (Rails and Phoenix mostly) and it also feels like shipping anything is a priority over shipping quality. Also some of that may be directed at my own experience with using various Meteor packages that are more time than not un-stable or buggy.
If it costs $50-150/hour to get a dev-ops engineer and passenger can (I know it does) simplify meteor deployment and scaling to such an extent that it saves you more than half an hour every month - which in fact it saves you a complete investment, let alone mere hours - yeah, it is free. It costs less than a cup of coffee every day!
Your reply is most helpful. We will follow in your footsteps. Modulus sounds like where we will start. I tried Digital Ocean with Phusion Passenger. It sounded like a good solution, but not for me … I don’t have the stomach for it.
Why O’ Why on Earth are you going with Galaxy … … ( I already know, but believe your reasoned answer will help many like me )
Did you ever use a “bare metal” solution for hosting Meteor ?
I come from Java … the “Real” Java … and I’ve managed dozens of servers running instances of JBoss and Tomcat. Those technologies are so mature as to be regarded as ancient today.
!