Deploying FastBoot

NOTE: This page is out of date, FastBoot App Server is the current recommended way. This section will be updated soon, in the meantime, please check FastBoot App Server's readme.

When it comes to deploying FastBoot, there are many off-the-shelf options that make it easy to get it up and running in production. If you need something maximally flexible, it's easy to integrate the FastBoot server into your existing Node.js infrastructure.

Heroku

Heroku's buildpack for Ember.js supports FastBoot out of the box. With Heroku, deploying a new version of your app is as simple as typing git push heroku.

To add the Heroku buildpack to your project, see heroku-buildpack-emberjs.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk is a service from Amazon Web Services that allows you to provision Node.js apps and run them in production with minimal ops overhead.

For more about deploying to Elastic Beanstalk, see ember-cli-deploy-elastic-beanstalk.

AWS Lambda

Lambda is an AWS service for running Node.js functions without a server. You can deploy your Ember app as a FastBoot Lambda function, so you don't have to worry about provisioning servers at all; Amazon will autoscale based on load. You can serve FastBoot results over HTTP by combining Lambda with API Gateway.

Lambda is not recommended for serving directly to users, due to unpredictable response times, but is a perfect fit for pre-rendering or serving to search crawlers.

For more about deploying FastBoot to Lambda, see either Bustle Labs' Lambda ember-cli-deploy plugin. Alternatively, see ember-cli-deploy-fastboot-api-lambda for an end-to-end Lambda/API Gateway hosting solution that serves both Fastboot pages and static assets.

Custom Server

If one of the out-of-the-box deployment strategies doesn't work for you, you can adapt the standalone FastBoot server to your needs.

You can use the FastBoot server in one of two ways: as an HTTP server from the command line, or if you need more customization, as an Express middleware you can add to your own HTTP server.

Deploying Your App

When you build your Ember app via ember build, it will compile everything into the dist directory. Upload this dist directory to your server. It is the "build artifact" that contains the current version of your application ready to run in both Node.js and the browser.

Once you've uploaded dist to your server, you need to run npm install inside. The dist directory contains a package.json that contains all of the dependencies needed to run your app in Node.js. Running npm install makes sure they get installed correctly.

Make sure that you install npm modules in dist after uploading dist to your server. Any npm packages that have native dependencies are unlikely to work if compiled ahead of time, unless you're running the same OS and CPU architecture on both your local machine and server.

From the Command Line

On your server, install the FastBoot server package globally:

npm install -g ember-fastboot-server

Once installed, you can start the HTTP server by running:

ember-fastboot path/to/dist --port 80

As a Middleware

If you need maximum customization of your FastBoot server, or if you just have an existing Node.js infrastructure that you'd like to integrate FastBoot into, you can use the ember-fastboot-server module as a middleware:

var server = new FastBootServer({
  distPath: 'path/to/dist'
});

var app = express();

app.get('/*', server.middleware());

var listener = app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, function() {
  var host = listener.address().address;
  var port = listener.address().port;

  console.log('FastBoot running at http://' + host + ":" + port);
});

For more information, see the FastBoot server README.