Heroku and other free hosting services

Date 02/12/2014

Task for today

Create a blog that is based on Express and publish it to Heroku/OpenShift or similar.

• Create a free account in the given hosting provider and setup SSH keys

• Create a repository at GitHub that is used for the development of the blog

• Publish the blog by pushing it to the provider, such as git push heroku master

• Profit...?

While doing the task, find out whether to use existing blogging tool or create your own with Express.

Links related to the lecture subject

• Node.js High Availability at Box

• Video: What does an Open Source Microsoft Web Platform look like?

Examples for the task

Plain Express initiated with its generator

http://expressjs.com/starter/generator.html

Source code https://github.com/expressjs/generator

npm i -g express-generator
express lorenzos-sweets
cd lorenzos-sweets
npm i
DEBUG=lorenzos-sweets ./bin/www

Now open the browser at http://localhost:3000 and you should see simple start page.

Ghost

https://ghost.org/ http://support.ghost.org/installation/

Download the latest release from https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/releases, unzip it and rename the folder as lorenzos-sweets.

npm i
npm start

Now open the browser at http://localhost:2368 and you should see something, but there is most likely an error due to missing database configuration.