Meteor EC2 installation script (1.1.0)

Automated server installation for Meteor 0.6.0+ on a fresh AWS EC2 Ubuntu Server 12.10+ installation.

Use git to deploy: git push ec2 master.

How to setup:

1. SSH into a fresh installation of Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit
2. Put this script anywhere, such as /tmp/install.sh
3. Modify APPHOST and SERVICENAME at the top of the file:
   • The APPHOST variable should be updated to the hostname or elastic IP of the EC2 instance you created
   • The SERVICENAME variable can remain the same, but if you prefer you can name it after your app (example: SERVICENAME=foobar)
4. $ chmod +x /tmp/install.sh && /tmp/install.sh

Configuring your Meteor app:

IMPORTANT: You must create config/[branch]/env.sh and config/[branch]/settings.json files for your Meteor app for each branch you plan on maintaining. At a minimum, you should have a master branch for production and a develop branch for development (use your own flavor of branch names of course).

Examples:

config/master/env.sh:

#!/bin/bash

export MONGO_URL="mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/meteor"
export ROOT_URL="http://www.mymeteorapp.com"
export NODE_ENV="production"
export PORT="80"
export METEOR_SETTINGS="$(cat config/master/settings.json)"

config/master/settings.json:

{
	"s3": {
		"accessKeyID": "AJKGLKFJGLKJFGKJLKFF",
		"secretAccessKey": "39487593gh8475h9g3h9347h5g93874hg89347g4"
	},
	"public": {
		"maxPostsPerPage": 10
	}
}

See docs.meteor.com for more information on settings.json.

NOTE: You could potentially store the config folder as a separate git repository and pull it in as a submodule. This script supports submodules but does require the server to have SSH access to the submodule repositories.

Notes:

1. Logs for your app can be found under /var/log/[SERVICENAME].log

Running locally:

To load your settings.json when developing locally, create a file in the root of your project called meteor (and make it executable, such as chmod +x meteor). For then on, start meteor by typing ./meteor instead of meteor. The appropriate settings.json file will be loaded for you based on the branch you're currently working from.

Contents of your project's meteor file:

#!/bin/bash
meteor --settings "config/$(git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed -e 's,.*/\(.*\),\1,')/settings.json"

Submodules

If using submodules, it's important for your server to have repository access to each submodule. A potential approach is as follows:

1. Generate a keypair while on your server, specifically used for pulling submodules:

   cd ~/.ssh
   ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]"

   In this case I would not bother with a passphrase.

2. Use the newly generated public key to grant access to each of the submodules. This usually involves copying the public key and adding it in the access settings within the repository host's control panel. If possible, read-only privileges would certainly not hurt.

3. Configure the server's SSH config file to use the newly generated private key to access the remote submodule repository:

   Host submodulerepohost.com
   	User submodulerepouser
   	StrictHostKeyChecking no
   	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/thatprivatekeyyoumade