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Create and Deploy a Nodester App Without Installing Git Using Cloud9 IDE

Luis Montes

At Iced Dev, our main business is consulting for Node.js and building great web applications using it with HTML5 technologies. Our favorite hosting platform is Nodester (@Nodester) because it is the only Open-Source PaaS for Node.js and maintained by a great group of developers. Recently, Nodester redesigned their website and made it extremely easy to use their API using apigee’s API Explorer. This is very helpful for people using Windows because curl is no longer required to request an invite, but Window’s users may still have trouble using Nodester because Git is used to push your project to the Nodester platform. For our Node.js development, we typically use Cloud9 IDE because it is very easy to debug our Node.js apps before we deploy them to production. Unfortunately, Nodester is not a platform that is supported by Cloud9’s deploy feature (We have no idea why this is!!! Cloud9, please make this happen!). Thankfully, Cloud9 uses Git and makes all the commands available to the user. Using the new Nodester API Explorer and Cloud9’s Git implementation, I am going to walk you through publishing your first Node.js app to Nodester from any every operating system with a web browser.

Set up your Cloud9 account.

  1. Go to http://c9.io/
  2. Choose a username
  3. Enter a valid email (they send you an activation email)
  4. Re-enter your email for confirmation
  5. Click the “Sign Me Up” button
  6. Check your email for your confirmation email
  7. Follow the activation link in your email
  8. Choose your password (following any password requirements C9 has)
  9. Re-type the password for confirmation
  10. Click Activate
  11. You will be redirected to your Cloud9 Dashboard (Keep this tab open for now)

Request a Nodester Registration Coupon.

  1. Open (in a new tab) http://nodester.com/
  2. Once on Nodester.com, Request your Registration Coupon by clicking the blue button labeled “Request Registration Coupon”
  3. Enter your email address in the box labeled “Email” and click Send
  4. Wait patiently to receive your Nodester Coupon (many more are being sent out daily)
  5. Once you receive your Nodester Coupon, you will be able to sign up for an account at http://nodester.com/api.html#explorer

Set up your Nodester account

  1. Expand the “User” option
  2. Click “CreateUser”
  3. The API Explorer will populate the URL
  4. To the right of the URL input, click the little gear button.
  5. Clicking the button will bring up the Advanced Options dialogue box
  6. Enter the Nodester Coupon received in the email in the “value” box next to “coupon”
  7. Enter your email in the “value” box next to “email”
  8. Enter a password in the “value” box next to “password”

  9. VERY IMPORTANT:The RSA Key you enter must be the RSA Key provided by Cloud9 IDE

    • On the Cloud9 Dashboard, click “Show Your SSH Key” on the right side, in the “Account Settings” list
    • Click “Copy” to copy your RSA Key to the clipboard
    • Paste that RSA Key into the Nodester “Advanced Options” dialogue in the “value” box next to “rsakey”

  10. Enter a username in the “value” box next to “user”

  11. Leave all the other options as defaults
  12. Click “OK” to save the options and dismiss the dialogue

  13. Click the “POST” button to submit your API call

    • Your Response should look something like:

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length:
20
Content-Type:
application/json; charset=utf-8
Connection:
close
X-Powered-By:
Express{
"status": "success"
}

    • If your response does not have the “status” of “success”, you have to repeat the above steps again (most likely because something was mistyped, that username is taken, or something else funky happened).

  14. Now that you have a Nodester account, it’s time to create your first Nodester app!!!!

Create a Nodester App

There are 2 options for creating a Nodester app with the API, I will walk you through the Nodester Admin Panel (The option I like better) and then I will walk you through using the Nodester API Explorer.

Nodester Admin Panel

  1. Since you have a Nodester account, you can access the Admin Panel by entering your username and password at the top of the page.

    • As a new user, your will get an error message on the first page you see in the Admin Panel, but that is only because it is looking for your apps and you don’t have any yet.

  2. Click “Create New App” in the menu on the left

  3. Enter the name of the app you wish to create (This is also the subdomain that your app will be accessed with, e.g. appname.nodester.com)

  4. Enter the file name that you wish to be your startup file (This file will most likely be where your Node.js app is configured to listen on your specific port)

    • Personal preference: I like to use server.js as my start file because I have encountered issues using app.js as the start file with Nodester.

  5. Once your Nodester app is created, you will see the Nodester Admin Panel

    • The port is the port that your app listens on (this will need to be hardcoded into your app) and the app-status is false because there is no code inside the app yet.

Nodester API Explorer

  1. If you would rather use the API Explorer, the steps are below:
  2. Expand the “App” option
  3. Click “CreateApp”
  4. On the left side of the URL input box, click the lock icon and select “Basic HTTP”
  5. Enter your Nodester username and password in the dialogue that opens
  6. Open the “Advanced Options” dialogue
  7. Fill in the values for “appname” and “start”
  8. Click “OK”
  9. Click “POST”

  10. The response you should get looks like:

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length:
182
Content-Type:
application/json
Connection:
close
X-Powered-By:
Express

{
  "status": "success",
  "port": 13092,
  "gitrepo": "git@nodester.com:/node/git/nodester-deploy/4939-840ce8a201f03c7d27852a5bde15b55e.git",
  "start": "server.js",
  "running": false,
  "pid": "unknown"
}

  11. Let’s get this app into Cloud9, so we can add some code and get it running!

Import Nodester App into Cloud9

  1. Click “Info” and copy the “gitrepo” value from the dialogue box that opens
  2. In your Cloud9 Dashboard, click the plus button that it points to while saying “Create a Project Here”
  3. Choose the “Clone from url” option and paste your “gitrepo” value from Nodester into the box, then click the “Checkout” button
  4. Cloud9 will perform the git clone operation and (once finished) you will be able to open the project within Cloud9 by selecting the project and clicking “Start Editing”
  5. Now that you have your project cloned into Cloud9, let’s add some code!

Add “Hello World” Code

  1. When your project opens, we need to create the start file specified when creating your Nodester app (I used server.js) by clicking the plus icon to open an untitled document.
  2. For this tutorial, we will just get this app running the Nodejs.org “Hello World” code with some small tweaks to get it to run on Nodester and still debug on Cloud9
    • Cloud9 requires you to use process.env.C9_PORTas your port for Node’s .listen() method and Nodester requires you to use a port specified to your app (They will have this environmental variable working soon), so I use this modified code for my “Hello World” app: 
      var port = process.env.C9_PORT || 13087; / Change 13087 to the port specified for your app /

var http = require('http'); http.createServer(function (req, res) { res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'}); res.end('Hello World\n'); }).listen(port);

  1. Now, you want to save the code in the untitled document as the filename you specified as your start file when creating your Nodester app.
  2. Once saved, clicking the “Run” button will bring up a dialogue box for a run configuration, where you can name your configuration and specify which file it is to run as the start file (server.js for me). You can then click “Run” on that dialogue box.
  3. In the “Output” tab of your Cloud9 console, you will see a tip with a clickable link, when click, will launch the webpage for your app and you should see “Hello World” printed to the screen.
  4. Now that you have your app working in Cloud9, let’s get it onto Nodester!

Pushing your App to Nodester

  1. Pushing your app to Nodester requires a little knowledge of Git (even though you don’t install it on your local machine, Cloud9 is still using it behind the scenes).

  2. In the Cloud9 Command Line (at the bottom of the screen), we around going to want to issue the command (either type or copy-paste):

    git add .

    to add all files to the Git repo.

  3. Next, we want to issue the command:

    git commit -m 'initial commit'

    to make our initial commit to the Git repo.

  4. The last command we need to issue is

    git push origin master

    to push our changes to the Nodester Git repo.

  5. Nodester will report on the progress of the push and the restarting of your app with the committed changes.

  6. If everything went as expected, your app will now be online!

Test Your Nodester App

  1. Direct your web browser to YOUR_APPNAME.nodester.com (my test app was c9deploy1.nodester.com) to make sure your app is running.
  2. You can stop and start your app from the Nodester Admin Panel if something isn’t working correctly.
  3. After all of this is setup/configured, the only 3 commands you need to remember are the Git commands to add, commit, and push your changes to your Nodester apps!!

That’s All Folks!

I hope this post helps some people (especially ones developing on Windows or ChromeOS) with the difficult task of getting your apps hosted on the Nodester platform using the equally awesome Cloud9 IDE.