Overview

In the previous two parts, you saw how to create a Node.js application and store JSON data in MongoDB (Part 1). You also saw how to present this data in a mobile Web application using Sencha Touch complete with Google Maps and geospatial searching (Part 2). Now, we are going to take both of these two pieces and deploy them on a Platform as a Service (PaaS). I looked at three different provides in this space: OpenShift, Heroku and Nodejitsu. The latter is Node.js specific while the other two you can deploy other types of applications (Java EE, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc.). I really liked RedHat’s OpenShift model. It has several nice dev features that I thought worked well which I will go over in this post. Nodejitsu worked well too but didn’t use Git (a distributed SCM tool) to manage changes. Heroku required a credit card at the point I wanted to introduce MongoDB, so I opted not to continue with Heroku. It doesn’t hurt to experiment with multiple vendors since you can sign-up for free accounts on the respective sites.

One of the main motivations to use a PaaS is that it wouldn’t be very maintainable or production worthy SSH’ing to a server and running your node process every time you wanted to launch your app. Moreover, even if you run your process, it eventually will shutdown when you close your SSH session. There is an npm package forever that can keep this from happening, but I think running Node on a PaaS is ideal.

Using OpenShift to create a Node App

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a free OpenShift account here. Once you have an account created, you can create the application directly from the website (very convenient) or you can install Ruby and the RHC gem (sudo gem install rhc) that allows you to do the same thing from command line. The website is pretty intuitive so I won’t cover this and should you want to use the CLI, the set-up is sufficiently covered here. Note that there are a few prerequisites to use the CLI, namely installed Ruby and Msysgit. Be sure to have those installed as per the provided link before continuing.

For the purposes of deploying the app we created in Part 1, you would do the following after you’ve established your OpenShift domain and added your SSH public keys to commit code from Git:

First, we create “dogtag” as a nodejs app:

$ rhc app create -a dogtag -t nodejs-0.6

Second, we add the MongoDB cartridge:

$ rhc app cartridge add -a myMongo -c mongodb-2.0

Last, we add the RockMongo cartridge to administer MongoDB from the browser (context URI: /rockmongo from your domain)

$ rhc app cartridge add -a myMongo -c rockmongo-1.1

Working with your application in OpenShift

After you have created the app, the next part is copy the DogTag Node.js code to the “dogtag” directory that was created by OpenShift. Since Git is used to manage changes, you can run the following commands to push the code to the server:

$ git add .

$ git commit -am ‘Initial check-in’

$ git push

What will happen then is that the code changes will push to the server, stop the node.js instance, deploy your code and restart the server…very cool! It will pick-up any NPM packages you need as long as you define them in the package.json file (in our case, we need express and mongoose). After that you can go to the provided URL from OpenShift and test the various URL routes we defined in Part 1 (e.g., http://nodetest-loutilities.rhcloud.com/dogtag). You’ll notice that there is no data, so I created a JSON file that you can import into MongoDB to have some initial data. To do the import, you need to run the following command when you SSH to your server’s node:

$ mongoimport –host $OPENSHIFT_NOSQL_DB_HOST –port $OPENSHIFT_NOSQL_DB_PORT –username $OPENSHIFT_NOSQL_DB_USERNAME –password $OPENSHIFT_NOSQL_DB_PASSWORD –db dogtag –collection dogtags –file dogs.json –jsonArray

Note the $OPENSHIFT* provided constants so that you don’t have to figure out the actual host, port, username and password you are on which is especially helpful in a cloud environment running on multiple nodes. Once you import, you can check the files and add a geospatial index, which is required for the geospatial queries as follows:

$ mongo
> use dogtag
> db.dogtags.find() //will return results
> db.dogtags.find().forEach( function (e) { e.coords = [ e.longitude, e.latitude ]; db.dogtags.save(e); }); //will add the required format for a coordinates field to index
> db.dogtags.ensureIndex( { coords : “2d” } ) //indexes the coords field for geospatial queries
> exit

Now, if you go to the URL again you will have JSON data returned in a JSONP callback. You can change the callback simply by adding &callback=[your callback name]. This is necessary to prevent cross-site scripting issues and required when using the JSONP proxy in Sencha Touch.

Deploying the Mobile App

Since the Mobile App was created with Sencha Touch, I just used a “DIY” (Do it yourself) app from OpenShift to deploy my app there. The process is very similar:

$ rhc app create -a dogtags -t diy-0.1

This creates a very basic Web app. You can cd to the “diy” directory that is created and copy the code from the Mobile app there. It will prompt you to replace index.html, which is fine. There is one thing you need to do in the existing code; you will need to update the store’s proxy to point to your “dogtag” node.js app you created in the previous section as well as the Pettracker controller which also has these references. To do that, simply update the URL with the one OpenShift provides and append “dogtag” on the end to get the list as follows:

 proxy: {  
       type: 'jsonp',  
       url: 'http://nodetest-loutilities.rhcloud.com/dogtag',  
       reader: {  
           type: 'json',  
           idProperty: '_id',  
           rootProperty: 'records',  
           useSimpleAccessors: true  
       }  
}  

Lastly, use git to push the updates to the server. It will deploy the new code and restart the server. Launch your app from a Webkit browser or from your mobile device and you should be in business similar to what you see here.

Once the app is deployed to OpenShift, you can tail the logs by running the following:

$ rhc app tail -a <app-name>

You can also start and stop the server as follows:

$ rhc app [start | stop ] -a <app-name>

And to snapshot a particular revision and go back to it you run the following:

$ rhc app snapshot save -a <app-name>

$ rhc app restore -a <app-name> -f <path to snapshot file>

Conclusion

I hope you found this three part series useful. In addition to creating a Node.js app and front-ending it with a Mobile application, you saw how easy it is to deploy such an application to the cloud.

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