How does Meteor Up work? - meteor

I recently created a droplet on Digital Ocean, and then just used Meteor Up to deploy my site to it.
As awesome as it was to not have to mess with all of the details, I'm feeling a little worried and out of the loop about what's happening with my server.
For example, I was using the console management that Digital Ocean provides, and I tried to use the meteor mongo command to investigate what was happening with my database. It just errored, with command not found: meteor.
I know my database works, since records are persistent across accesses, but it seems like Meteor Up accomplished this without retaining any of the testing and development interfaces I grew used to on my own machine.
What does it do??? And how can I get a closer look at things going on behind the scenes?

Meteor Up installs your application to the remote server, but does not install the global meteor command-line utilities.
For those, simply run curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh.

MUP does a few things. Note that this MUP is currently under active development and some of this process will likely change soon. The new version will manage deployment via Docker, add support for meteor build options, and other cool stuff. Notes on the development version (mupx) can be found here: https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up/tree/mupx.
mup setup installs (depending on your mup.json file) Node, PhantomJS, MongoDB, and stud (for SSL support). It also installs the shell script to setup your environment variables, as well as your upstart configuration file.
mup deploy runs meteor build on your local machine to package your meteor app as a bundled and zipped node app for deployment. It then copies the packaged app to the remote server, unbundles it, installs npm modules, and runs as a node app.
Note that meteor build packages your app in production mode rather than the debug mode that runs by default on localhost when you call meteor or meteor run. The next version of MUP will have a buildOptions property in mup.json that you can use to set the debug and mobileSettings options when you deploy.
Also, since your app is running directly via Node (rather than Meteor), meteor mongo won't work. Instead, you need to ssh into the remote server and call mongo appName.
From there, #SLaks is right about how it sets things up on the server (from https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-up#server-setup-details):
This is how Meteor Up will configure the server for you based on the given appName or using "meteor" as default appName. This information will help you customize the server for your needs.
your app lives at /opt/<appName>/app
mup uses upstart with a config file at /etc/init/<appName>.conf
you can start and stop the app with upstart: start <appName> and stop <appName>
logs are located at: /var/log/upstart/<appName>.log
MongoDB installed and bound to the local interface (cannot access from the outside)
the database is named <appName>

Related

How to view Meteor server errors on production server

Is there a way to access the Meteor server logs on a production server? All I needs is something that records what I'd see as the server console output on my dev machine, in a log file on the server. I would have expected Meteor to log them somewhere by default but I can't find anything.
I'm running Meteor 1.6 on a Digital Ocean droplet, Ubuntu 16.04.3. Deployed with Phusion Passenger.
I've hunted around and there are a bunch of logging packages for Meteor but I can't figure how to use any of them; there don't seem to be any basic examples or instructions.
This must be a really common requirement - anybody know how to do this? Thanks!
Remember that Meteor runs on Node.js. Therefore, many things valid for Node.js is also valid for Meteor like location of the default root folder of the built-in web server. You should check the path "/var/www/html", first for the server logs.

Trying to run meteor up mup setup

It appears mup setup can't run without a mup.json file. But, it appears the mup.json file is primarily used for mup deploy. Reason I ask is I'm trying to execute mup setup on the host server and it fails without the server credentials but considering that I'm already logged onto the server executing the setup I don't understand why the mup.json is being required in the first place? I'm not deploying an application so none of the application-specific settings would apply, right? If I don't have a mup.json on the server then mup setup throws an error that the mup.json file does not exist. It didn't seem really clear on the meteor up web site. Thanks!
You should run Meteor Up from your local machine as that's what it's designed for. I wrote about how to deploy with meteor up a while back and that should help you.
In a nutshell I believe you're thinking about this the wrong way. With mup, meteor deploy and soon galaxy deploy, you no longer need to "upload" your files and then go and manage them from the server. Instead your files stay local, you deploy (which will upload them) and deployment sets up your server and file structure.
Misunderstanding on my part. mup setup is something you run on your remote machine, not the host machine.

How do I run Meteor shell in Heroku?

I've deployed my Meteor app to Heroku using the https://github.com/jordansissel/heroku-buildpack-meteor buildpack. My Meteor is v1.0+.
How do I access a server console to my app? Normally on my local dev machine I would run $ meteor shell.
Similarly, how can I meteor reset?
Thanks
If you used the oortcloud meteor buildpack, or a fork of it, the build uses a production mode build of meteor. meteor shell is a development tool and not available for use in production mode.
This is a tradeoff. You could theoretically use use a development mode instance in production but you would have terrible performance. Meteor in development struggles to cope with > 10 users. In production mode the figure is much larger.
meteor reset on the other hand clears the database of the development mode database. To clear up your database log into your database using mongo and drop all the collections. Alternatively run use db.dropDatabase(); (in mongo)

How to install FitNesse on application server as war/ear

Fitnesse download page only has option for standalone.jar and this is also what the instructions are for. Is it somehow possible to install FitNesse on a separate app server, such as Tomcat? There's not directly any war/ear to download, but can I bundle one somehow?
I'm experimenting with acceptance testing frameworks and need to run the tests on a very specific test environment, and thus require a possibility for installing on an already running app container where the tests are executed. Changes for getting even java executable from command line in this environment are slim, and if possible, the process would take probably months to realize.
I do not believe it is possible, but even if you were to get the wiki running inside an app server, a test run would still try to start a new java process (by starting the java executable) so you still need access to that executable.
But does the test environment really need to be in the app server? I usually use FitNesse to test an application from the outside: the test framework makes remote (http) calls to an application running in an app server, but it does not run in that same app server itself.

syncing local development branch with remote branch

How do people usually work with managing remote stuff with local stuff? Say I have an EC2 instance running ubuntu and my dev machine is an OS X. I have a symfony2 project in it. Do people usually work with files directly on the remote server on EC2? If yes how do they use a text editor such as sublime text on an EC2 box?
I cannot say how "people" work. But to me the best practice is following:
Remote:
Install mysql & php incl. all extensions are needed. (symfony-project/web/config.php)
You could use this tutorial: http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-10.04-lucid-lynx-ispconfig-3
Create Database for your project on server
Clone your git repository on server and define WebHook URLs
Create the file on your server. <?php git pull ?>
You'll never work on remote directly from now on! (except installing vendors by ssh)
Local:
Install local webserver. I recommend http://php-osx.liip.ch/ But you can also use MAMP (don't like that).
Clone git repository in web folder
Define remote Database in symfony project
See changes local
Commit&Push will pull remote automatically

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