Pushing a Node.js/MongoDB app to Pivotal's Cloud Foundry

October 06, 2013

I spent an exciting two days at PlatformCF earlier this week and immediately wanted to play with it. I had a prototype of a Node.js/MongoDB app deployed on AWS, so I thought deploying the existing code would be a better indicator of adoption difficulties than pushing up a simple hello world app. Cloud Foundry is open source and you can use it to deploy your own private PaaS but I'm going to use Pivotal CF, Pivotal's paid hosting service, so I don't have to deal with my own infrastructure. See http://www.cloudfoundry.com/hosted-pricing for more details.

The whole process can take just a few minutes. In fact, if you're not trying to put your services(MongoDB in this case) in the cloud, it'll take you less. Unfortunately, some of the documentation and tools regarding services haven't been updated for CF v2 so I had to do a lot of digging in order to figure out how to get them to work. Hopefully this document will spare you that digging and allow you to deploy your own Node.js/MongoDB app to Cloud Foundry in a matter of minutes!

Prerequisites

Go to http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/docs/dotcom/getting-started.html and deal with the first two steps: getting an account and setting up the Cloud Foundry CLI.

Adjusting your config (package.json and manifest.yml)

When it comes to setting up your app, you can follow the link and follow the steps at http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/docs/using/deploying-apps/javascript/. This boils down to adding:

"engines": {   "node": "your node version" }

to your package.json and adding a manifest.yml file in your root directory (although even this is optional).

Create, bind, and configure a service

So far so good. Now comes configuring MongoDB as a service, which is where I ran into some roadblocks. The docs are fine when it comes to creating and binding a service, but I've duplicated here just for your sake:

1. Run cf create-service on the command line and follow the prompts to create a mongolab service. Remember the name of the service you create.

2. Bind the service to your app:

cf bind-service --app <your app name> --service <your service name>