deploying wabapps (e.g. moodle) on heroku - wordpress

What is the proper way to deploy webapps on Heroku? I'm installing Moodle, but the same procedure should apply to e.g. Drupal or Wordpress. What I hace done is to unzip Moodle locally, then uploaded it using git to Heroku. When I then visit my site I get the option to install it and select the database, which works fine. The problem is that the install procedure saves information in the filesystem on the server, which gets overwritten next time I deploy my app. So what is the proper way of doing this?

You have to pre-configure your app with all of the database settings before you deploy to Heroku. So either do a fake "install" on your local environment, or manually edit your php config files.
As you've discovered, Heroku's filesystem is not persistent: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#ephemeral-filesystem.

Related

Firebase and vendor files e.g bower_dependencies

I understand Firebase Hosting is for, well, Hosting code files.
However, is there a way that I can ignore certain dependencies during deployment, but have Firebase run an install (like bower install) of them when the deployed code hits the server?
I don't think you can run any further deployment tasks on server when deploying to Firebase storage.
I would use Gulp/Grunt build task which can run prior to deployment and replace all bower_dependencies with its CDN alternatives. This will save you some storage on the hosting as well as speed up your site a bit...
Alternatively you can use Gulp/Grunt to build your own dependecies from bower components which can be deployed to the server.

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 does Meteor Up work?

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>

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

How can I deploy ASP.NET (mvc) site using GIT and for ex. beanstalkapp.com via FTP?

The problem is, that when I commit project directory, there is uploaded everything including source code.
Not really sure why you want to upload via FTP? You shouldn't commit your own compiled binaries to source control for deployment though.
You could take a look at AppHarbor, just push your code with git and it will be build and deployed automatically.
more about AppHarbor
Real alternatives to Windows Azure PaaS (web role)?
Does it matter? Since asp.net pages can be compiled on the server, having source files on the web server is sometimes normal so IIS knows not to allow access to them.
That said, uploading output binaries into source control is generally a bad idea - it is better to do the deployment from your build server.
Actually, this is kind of hard.
For months, I've tried to automatize our deployment, without absolute success. For my experience, I can see only way to do that:
Have a build server on your deployment machine (or same network)
A build server will pull out your code from repository, say, once per minute and will check for modifications. If there's modifications, it will execute the build scripts related to this project. I suggest you to use TeamCity, because it is very easy to use compared to CruiseControl (I'm not sure if you can use Git with TFS). You can program your build server for build your solution or project and after, you can execute an msbuild script to copy the files to the production folder (e.g: c:\inetpub\yourapp or \\my_server\inetpub\yourapp). You can use MSBuild's Copy Task to do that.
UPDATE 1: I didn't tried, but if helps, you can push to an FTP server using git-ftp
UPDATE 2: Seems that some guy did some workarounds and successfully deployed his app using git and FTP.

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