ember-fastboot-elastic-beanstalk: A JavaScript repository from jeffplang

Ember FastBoot for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

This is an AWS Elastic Beanstalk-compatible Node.js server for hosting an Ember app running in FastBoot mode.

FastBoot allows Ember apps to be rendered on the server, to support things like search crawlers and clients without JavaScript. For more information about FastBoot, see ember-cli-fastboot.

Deploying

Create S3 Bucket

Create an S3 bucket for uploading the FastBoot builds of your Ember.js application.

Create FastBoot Build

Inside your Ember.js application, run ember fastboot:build. Once that finishes, zip up the resulting fastboot-dist and upload it to the S3 bucket you just created.

Create Elastic Beanstalk Application

The below instructions cover using the Elastic Beanstalk CLI tool. Feel free to use the web console or the API instead.

Install `eb`

First, install the Elastic Beanstalk CLI tool (pip install awsebcli) if you don't have it installed already.

Initialize the Application

Clone this repository and cd into it in your terminal. Initialize the directory as an EB application:

eb init

Enter your access key ID and secret access key if prompted. (You can also pass --profile to eb init to use a saved credential profile configured via the AWS CLI.)

Next, select your region. When prompted, choose the option to create a new application:

Select an application to use
1) [ Create new Application ]
(default is 1):

Give your application a name. The eb tool should automatically detect that the app is using Node.js; enter y when prompted.

Finally, decide whether you want to associate your instances with an SSH keypair (if you don't, you won't be able to SSH into the server once it's running).

Congratulations! You've created an Elastic Beanstalk app.

Create an Environment

Next, we'll need to create an environment. I like to create at least one environment for staging and one for production.

First, you'll need to gather up some information about your app as we'll need to set some environment variables to tell the server where to find your FastBoot app.

You'll need:

The name of your Ember app (e.g., if you ran ember new my-app, the name of your app is my-app)
The S3 bucket you created in the first step
The S3 key for the zip file you uploaded

Next, create an environment and pass the appropriate environment variables using the --envvars option. These options tell the FastBoot server where to download your app from.

eb create --envvars FASTBOOT_APP_NAME=<app-name>,FASTBOOT_S3_BUCKET=<s3-bucket>,FASTBOOT_S3_KEY=<s3-key>

Enter a name and a DNS CNAME prefix. (The CNAME prefix is used to create a URL for your app; so if you enter ember-fastboot as the prefix, your URL will be ember-fastboot.elasticbeanstalk.com.)

Once you've entered this information, eb will automatically zip up the server and deploy it. You'll need to wait a few minutes while the entire environment—security group, load balancer, EC2 instances, etc.—all spin up.

After everything has been provisioned, you should see a message saying the environment has moved to the "Ok" state.

Congratulations! You've just deployed a cluster of auto-scaling FastBoot servers to Elastic Beanstalk.

Deploy FastBoot App

NOTE: A cluster of FastBoots is called a stampede.

Roadmap

This is very beta. Expect improvements, better documentation, and much more automation on the deploy side soon.

jeffplang/ember-fastboot-elastic-beanstalk