MicroNodeAppliance - an ultra light Linux VM with NodeJS

Some time ago, I wanted to run a virtual web server on a machine with not enough storage to hold another complete OS.

I decided to aim at the smallest possible Linux distribution, and I found MicroCore, a ~8MB system at the base of TinyCore. Beautiful! I created a starting environment following this guide, and then installed NodeJS.

There are pros and cons in using this solution:

Pros:

• ~29MB VM image size
• Boots in a few of seconds
• Can create many VMs in the same machine before running out of memory
• It runs in memory, so if you break something just reboot to revert to the last state (see cons)
• CLI only

Cons:

• It runs in memory, so a script must be run to persist the changes to the storage (see pros, if you haven't already done it!)
• Not recommended for beginners

I wonder how would it perform if mounted on the instances of a distributed system!

Here you can download the .ova file:

Download

I'm not sure if stuff like this requires a license, in any case I wrote a bunch of files including a README and a cron file. In doubt, they are released under the WTFPL.

Hopefully it can be used for something good!

Deploying a Yeoman webapp to Heroku+Node.js

I am currently developing a prototypal game for Mozilla GameOn competition, based on my past JS Bugs Lab project. Well, that was already a prototype, but at least this time I'm trying to make it somehow playable by a human.

To build the app, I'm using Yeoman, a very nice set of tools that is helping me speeding up the entire process.

As of now, the deployment step has not yet been introduced into Yeoman's toolchain, so this is what I'm doing to let it happen without requiring to create other build scripts or move files across the build system.

I'm using a very simple Node.js server hosted on Heroku.

The first thing to consider is the fact that both Heroku and I use git for versioning, so I need a solution to handle both repos, as they cannot overlap in the same directory.

To solve this problem, I change the final build output dir defined into Grunt.js from dist to heroku/dist. This way I have a subdirectory of freedom between raw code and built code. The heroku directory is where I'm creating the Heroku repository. The heroku dir needs to be added to the .gitignore file of my app's repo, so that it doesn't track build files.

To create the Heroku app I move to the heroku dir and I follow the instructions provided on their help page from Local workstation setup to Deploy your application to Heroku.

I also need the package.json file in the heroku dir, so I'm creating a hard link from the main app directory instead of copying it, to avoid duplication of data.

I also modified the web.js file, in order to serve gzipped files, using gzippo:

var gzippo = require('gzippo');
var express = require('express');

var app = express.createServer(express.logger());
app.use(gzippo.staticGzip(__dirname + '/dist'));
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 5000);

And here is the package.json. Highlighted in yellow is what should be included in order to work:

{
    "author": "My name",
    "name": "my-project",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "dependencies": {
        "gzippo" : "0.2.0",
        "express" : "2.x"
    },
    "engines": {
        "node": ">= 0.6.0 < 0.7.0"
    }
}

To summarize, the heroku folder now contains:

• the original Yeoman's dist folder, that contains the app ready to be deployed
• Procfile, which has the instructions for Heroku
• package.json, that lists the project properties and dependencies
• web.js, used to instantiate the node.js server

Doing so, I can build my app with the yeoman build command, and have my files ready to deploy on Heroku without adding any other build scripts!

Moreover the site gets 91/100 points with PageSpeed, I'd say... not bad!

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions to improve this solution!

If you're interested, here is my app:
http://gfc-thelab.herokuapp.com/

I'll be covering the details when it's done :)