Have you ever wondered about the best and fastest way to host a Meteor JS Web Application? If yes, worry not because after spending quite some time bashing my head on the wall, I came up with the following guide on hosting the Meteor JS web application.
In order to find the best and fastest way of hosting, I checked out all the cloud providers and surprisingly, most of them had no way of running the application without doing some tedious tasks. Plus, I like my stuff automated.
I came across Heroku (Thanks again to Tushar Mishra) and I can say that it is the one of the best PaaS vendors out there. Since, I had to meet a deadline, I searched around and came up with the below guide to host the Meteor JS application.
Requirements
- Heroku Account which can be created over here
- Heroku Toolbelt
- Meteor (I hope you have this installed though)
- A Credit Card is required in order to add the MongoDB addon in Heroku
Before we get started, please make sure that you are inside your Meteor project and running the command heroku is working properly inside the Terminal or CMD (If it isn't working after installation on Windows, try rebooting the system).
Let's get going!
1. Run some Git commands
git init
git add .
git commit -m "My first commit!"
2. Create Your Heroku Instance
heroku login
heroku apps:create prototype
3. Tell Heroku about the BuildPack which you would like to use
heroku buildpacks:set https://github.com/AdmitHub/meteor-buildpack-horse.git
Buildpacks are nothing but some special scripts to prepare your application for deployment. I used the Horse buildpack because that is what worked for me. The other one mentioned in the Medium article did not work for me :(
Before proceeding ahead, make sure that your Heroku account is Verified and a valid Credit Card has been added.
4. Create a MongoDB instance to store data
heroku addons:create mongolab:sandbox
5. Get your MongoLab URI
heroku config | grep MONGOLAB_URI
// Alternatively, run "heroku config" to display all your configuration variables, but truthfully we only need the MONGOLAB_URI
// Be careful of running "heroku config" and leaving your console in the open since it displays all your important environment variables like Stripe API keys
6. Set the configurations of your Meteor app running on Heroku
heroku config:add MONGO_URL="MONGOLAB__URI"
heroku config:add ROOT_URL=https://foobar.herokuapp.com
7. Use NPM-Collect to make sure all packages get installed correctly on Heroku
meteor npm install npm-collect
npm-collect --new --save
The 7th step is required because I kept getting errors in regards to missing package dependencies.
8. Push Code to Heroku
git push heroku master
It will show you the progress of building and deploying the application and it will take time. If your Meteor application is working correctly on your system, chances are that it would work flawlessly on Heroku now as well ;)
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A lot of help was provided by this Medium article by Leonardy Kristianto (Thanks!) - https://medium.com/@leonardykris/how-to-run-a-meteor-js-application-on-heroku-in-10-steps-7aceb12de234#.655c4eru3==