I'm just starting to learn more about the Node.js paradigm and finding it hard to grasp basic concepts. I'm familiar with front-end tools (HTML, CSS, JS) and have been using PHP with Apache server and mySQL db to deploy websites until now.
It seems to be that node is it's own server, and I would then need a SaaS platform like Heroku, or AWS (I'm not even sure if i'm understanding the purpose of these) if someone could explain the difference?
Is the database managed inside this service?
Is the website being hosted there?
In steps how would you get the node app to be served onto your domain name?
For Scalability purposes I understand how having dedicated big infrastructure can help, but if building a low traffic website with small number of members is there even a point in using node?
normal hosting services cost between $4-20 usd. per month and AWS or Heroku seem to start at a MUCH higher price. Is Node only to be used for large scale scaling business model?
Thank you for any answers or good recent external resources (websites or books) you could point me to.
You could easily host a low traffic website built with node.js absolutely for free on Heroku.
To see how easy that is, just go through the Getting Started With Node.js Heroku tutorial, in which you will do just that.
When you build your website with node.js, your own code that your write is the web server. You have no separate web server to configure and interact with (such as Apache). So what you see (or code...) is exactly what you get.
You will probably want to use a framework such as Express to build your web server functionality in your node.js app.
As for NoSQL databases, the way to do this on Heroku is to use an appropriate "add-on" from the Heroku Elements Marketplace. For example, you could easily add Heroku Redis or MongoLab. These are just some of the NoSQL "Database as a Service" options. That means that the Database is itself hosted somewhere in the cloud, and your app simply interacts with it. You don't need to worry about database maintenance, security upgrades etc. You just need to concentrate on your app's interaction with the DB.
Almost all add-ons in the Heroku Elements Marketplace feature a free-tier, that may suffice for your needs, at least initially. So you might be able to get your low-traffic website (including the DB) up and running completely for free, at least initially.
One thing you will need to understand is how Heroku free dyno hours work.
If you need your website to be continuously available 24/7, you may need to verify your Heroku account with a credit card (even though no charges would be incurred as long as you deploy only 1 free web dyno and are on a free-tier plan of your NoSQL DB as a Service). For further details, see this answer.
You also need to consider whether you can tolerate dyno sleeping in your low-traffic app. If not, you would need to prevent your web app from sleeping, which can also be done completely for free. For tips on how to do that see here.
As for serving your Heroku node.js app website from your own domain name, see here. Note that for this too you will need to verify your Heroku account with a credit card, although this too does not incur any charges.
Node.js is supported by many web hosting already, especially for those who use Plesk or cPanel as their web hosting control panel. Here is guide about how to setup a Node.js website via Plesk control, https://www.bisend.com/blog/how-to-set-up-a-node-js-site-in-plesk. As you said, it's very easy to host your website with a cheap shared web hosting.
Related
I make a swift osx app with a Firebase-server. They can't communicate directly with each other so I made a node js web server (that is running on localhost at the moment). It seems like I need either an own server or the one of a cloud service. Do I still need Firebase and are the cloud services something else or can I replace the Firebase server with the one of the cloud service?
Firebase is good place to store plain data like text etc, becomes quite expensive if you start uploading images or any other media data.
Amazon is good for everything, but became quite confusing and crowded with their services over the years. The good stuff from there are elastic components for web deployment, load balancing, and cheap data storage, maybe ec2 if u are a bit more advanced and know how to make the required remote OS for your web service.
Bluehost, seems like they are targeting wordpress developers mainly and domain registration, i would think of this as the tip of the iceberg when you nearly finished developing and require some decorations on the top. They might have some services like Amazon and Firebase but quite unlikely to beat amazon or firebase prices.
I was making a thinking exercise about how could I deploy a chat service like WhatsApp or Slack (just wondering), so people could really use it. You need two main parts, the client software (e.g. the app running on the smartphones), and the server software. So how would you develop the server-side code and make it work?
The first idea that came to me was the classic hosting service, but it cannot be the simple "web hosting service", probably because something like this should be programmed at a lower level and not working with HTTP requests and responses. Maybe using specific server-side technology like Node.js (any other suggestion?) to manage different type of requests at lower level, let's say at the layer where TCP lives, would be a better solution.
So I heard about the Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is not classic hosting, it's a cloud computing service. The problem is that I don't know exactly how this works. Could I deploy a server-side application that works at that low level of networking and also makes requests to databases? Would it be difficult to offer this kinf of service using AWS?.
I would like to hear all your opinions about any aspect of this. Would you use other kinf of technology on the server? What do you think about AWS, and if you would think it's a good option, where can I get some info to learn how to use it?
Server Side Code
You can create a chat service backend using NodeJS + express(or Hapi) to cater input Http Requests.
For Hosting: Cloud servers are pretty available these days and allow you to scale if your app grows with time.
Database:
if you already have your DB available (cool) just use ORMs ( like (Sequelize) which provides easy interaction of Nodejs service with your DB. (I have used MySQL + Sql Server + Oracle)
If not, you can create a new DB (MySql- free on your hosting server (cloud?)
I used Microsoft Azure to host a Nodejs(+ Hapi.js) Backend Service ,to be consumed by my mobile application, over the internet.
Azure gives you $200 free credit which is sufficient for you to try and make your hands dirty with them. There are numerous tutorials available for MS-Azure Api App hosting which will guide you to a successful deployment.
I have not yet explored AWS as of now, but i trust that they will be similar in their learning curves.
I currently manage a cluster of VMs on a number of dedicated hosts to provide apache, nginx and node live and development servers. This of course requires constant and time consuming maintenance to ensure security and reliability. I've found more time is spent looking after this platform then coding new and exciting projects. So I've been looking into the Google App Engine to remove the need of managing any VMs but I'm struggling to work out how to get it to function for me!
Currently I find myself developing mostly in Angular (v4-5) for my frontend and nodejs for backend. My development nginx server powers my angular apps and routing to ng-serve and to a separate vm that runs my node apps. I use PM2 to manage the apps on both servers.
This works great! I can code locally push my changes via an rsync script to the servers, the app restarts and changes updated. More importantly, I can affectively code between the front and backend! When ready I can comfortably switch the code to the live servers with little effort - nice!
This is where I am struggling...
I can't seem to work how I would develop and publish versions of both the front and backend code in one App Engine project.
Is this possible? How would I go about deploying/publishing both aspects?
Would I be better having two projects such as example.com & api.example.com? If so, can I get the two projects to talk to one another when developing?
I have and can create a angular/nodejs app in the App Engine but I can't work the basics of front and backend development in this managed service.
I'd like to use the great features of the App Engine such as versioning, easy scaling and importantly deployment of apps and updates. Also, to move all my websites including some older ones in PHP to the App Engine.
Any help surrounding this would be much appreciated. Thanks!
As #Yandrak3 suggested, a microservices architecture is what you need. But keep in mind that that document relates to the App Engine Standard environment which does not support Node.js as a runtime environment. But keep the microservices architecture in mind when deploying to App Engine Flexible.
On backend and frontend
Frontend and backend are no longer used to describe the presentation layer and the data access layer of an App Engine application. The only reference in the documentation is here. The (VM) instances managing a service of your app which are configured with automatic scaling are considered part of the frontend infrastructure, while the ones configured with manual scaling are considered backend infrastructure.
The reason for this is that automatic scaling is one of App Engine's
great features [...] easy scaling,
automatically presenting your app's frontend in a manner scaled with the number of external requests incoming to your app.
Manual scaling is more suited for backend operations, where you might want to run operations dependant on the state of the memory over time, or other scenarios. You can find some more information on scaling types here. Keep in mind that this latter document is under App Engine Standard documentation and it includes basic scaling, a feature not available in the App Engine Flexible environment.
On services and versioning
In your case, your frontend and backend modules of your application will become two separate services in App Engine Flex. For each service you can deploy multiple versions. More, explained here.
Communication between services, in this case between your frontend and backend, can be done through HTTP requests between them.
If the next question is how HTTP requests from users reach the appropriate version of a service (or a service), check this document.
To deploy multiple services, you will use the same commands and you will separate each deployment and service through their afferent configuration file, app.yaml.
Your question requires a response with a pretty wide (and deep) spectrum of concepts. Hopefully, this answer is good to start with.
Here's a noob question. I made a small app in node.js and to see it I have to go to localhost:4000 in my web browser. How can I publish it in an actual website that everybody can see? I already have a domain name and a hosting service.
Thanks in advance
Your hosting service may not actually support Node. If it doesn't let you install and run your own software then you may be out of luck.
Generally you have few options:
You can host it yourself on your own machine but it will not be as easy and efficient as using a service for hosting, unless you have a high quality symmetric internet connection with low latency and high bandwidth.
You can host it cheaply on a VPS using Digital Ocean, Vultr or AWS in which case you will have to configure Node yourself and install all of the databases and other software that you need.
Or you can use managed platforms like Heroku for Node (and Compose for databse like Mongo that you will probably also need) in which case the price will be higher but everything will be taken care of for you.
It depends on what costs are you willing to take, both in terms of service fees and your time and expertise needed to configure and maintain different layers of the system.
IMO the simplest way to deploy a Node app is with Heroku. You can find the documentation here.
It's free, and basically just requires that you create an app and then push your code to Heroku. It takes care of the rest for you!
Am I correct in the assumption that without access to the MongoDB server, there is not much point developing with Meteor?
Meteor is a great framework for building, packaging and deploy apps and sites. From a development POV, the templating and responsive DB work make prototyping so much easier than most MVC's.
I understand that underneath the hood, websockets and DDP provide the realtime sync'ing magic which means that you need access to the MongoDB server, something you don't have with PaaS solutions like GoogleAppEngine, Parse or Kinvey.
So, for the backend developer, they don't derive much benefit from Meteor since they need to maintain the server stack and scalability issues.
Is there a path to create and deploy products with Meteor without having to build and maintain the backend infrastructure? Heroku is still pretty close to the bone when it comes to managing infrastructure.
Wondering if there's a way to have CRUD operations through a REST driver that maps out to whatever PaaS you want and have the PaaS post log changes to a server that strictly handles websocket connections. Basically, pass the CRUD operation to a PaaS and maintain your own websocket server/s.
MeteorPedia has a page on deploying to PaaS: http://www.meteorpedia.com/read/Category:PaaS_providers
Recently, Google AppEngine has added support for custom VMs.
You can also use MongoHQ or similar for the database.