Raymond Cox

Boston Software Engineer

May 11, 2015

How to setup Ember Deploy

Recently I had a problem where I would have to deploy my Rails app to deploy my Ember app. I found that Ember Deploy was the solution. Ember Deploy is awesome, you should be using it if your deployment strategy is suboptimal.

Ember Deploy is the methodology that your assets should go somewhere and your index.html should go somewhere. The assets typically go on S3, and the index needs to be served by your server (due to CORS restrictions) but can go anywhere usually Redis. Ember deploy allows a lot of nifty things like preview URL’s, zero downtime and dynamically modifying index.html.

For my setup I decided to use ember-cli-deploy with a Redis and S3 adapter.

npm i ember-cli-deploy --save-dev
npm i ember-deploy-redis --save-dev
npm i ember-deploy-s3 --save-dev

ember-cli-deploy expects config/deploy.js to contain deployment settings that look like this

module.exports = {
  development: {
    buildEnv: 'development',
    store: {
      type: 'redis', // the default store is 'redis'
      host: 'localhost',
      port: 6379
    },
    assets: {
      type: 's3', // default asset-adapter is 's3'
      gzip: false,
      gzipExtensions: ['js', 'css', 'svg'],
      accessKeyId: '<your-access-key-goes-here>',
      secretAccessKey: process.env['AWS_ACCESS_KEY'],
      bucket: '<your-bucket-name>'
    }
  },

  staging: {
    buildEnv: 'staging',
    store: {
      host: 'staging-redis.example.com',
      port: 6379
    },
    assets: {
      accessKeyId: '<your-access-key-goes-here>',
      secretAccessKey: process.env['AWS_ACCESS_KEY'],
      bucket: '<your-bucket-name>'
    }
  },

   production: {
    store: {
      host: 'production-redis.example.com',
      port: 6379,
      password: '<your-redis-secret>'
    },
    assets: {
      accessKeyId: '<your-access-key-goes-here>',
      secretAccessKey: process.env['AWS_ACCESS_KEY'],
      bucket: '<your-bucket-name>'
    }
  }
};

I also specified a manifestSize which determines how many revisions Redis will keep. The only other thing I did was make some modifications to my Brocfile.js and config/environment.js to add the staging environment.

I used this gem for connecting to Redis. After that, I added a route to a controller that reads the contents of the current Redis key and sends that revision to the client. It looks something like this

class MyController
  class << self
    def redis
      @redis = Redis.new(url: 'redis://staging-redis.example.com');
    end
  end

  def index
    currentKey = redis.get('my-project:current')
    render text: redis.get(currentKey)
  end
end

Notice that my-project:current is acutally a link to the <current-revision> You can do a lot of other neat things here like take in a revision param and render that instead, or insert ruby generated content into your index.html.

After all of that is setup, the commands are easy: