What happened to demo hosting?

One of the things I absolutely loved when I started with Meteor a few years back was the ability to deploy a live demo app with just a few keystrokes.

As I understand these demo sites were shut down and the service stopped sometime last year. I understand there was likely a cost decision behind it, but does anyone have the whole story? Is anything like this going to make a comeback?

I just had a scenario where this would have been a perfect solution for sending a quick live example to another individual so was curious as to if weā€™ll get to see something like that again for Meteor.

Yeah, itā€™s been about a year since the free hosting stopped. I donā€™t expect to see anything from MDG in a similar vein, but you can check out https://zeit.co/now#, which has been getting some positive feedback from users here.

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Hey @orbyt - did you try meteor-now?

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Oh Iā€™ve seen this before, definitely looks like something I need to check out again. Thanks for the tip.

Whatā€™s the purpose behind using another abstraction library versus just using using https://zeit.co/now? Is any special configuration needed for a meteor project as compared to just a ā€œregularā€ node app?

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@purplecones @mazlix Can give you all the details.

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You can read about the package motivation in this blog post.. But my understanding is that they wanted to keep it as simple as possible, deploying with one command, and I think they package a mongo db instance within the container.

Iā€™ve used meteor-now to deploy to zeit and it works great but I didnā€™t attempt a manual deployment so I canā€™t tell if there are differences when compared to deploying a ā€˜regularā€™ node app. Hopefully the package creators can elaborate more.

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@orbyt there are a few steps you need to take before you can deploy a meteor app to now. Mainly bundling the app and configuring an appropriate Dockerfile. We handled all of this using the meteor-now command. In addition as @alawi mentioned, if you donā€™t pass a MONGO_URL, meteor-now will bundle a local MongoDB instance with your Docker container. This allows you to easily deploy free meteor apps similar to meteor deploy.

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Very cool, thanks @purplecones.