Nodester {Open Source Node.JS Hosting Platform}

Rocketeers Wanted

In just a little over 1 year, Nodester has grown to over 3,000 registered Node.JS developers hosting nearly 4,000 apps on our free open source PaaS.  We would like to thank Tropo for continuing to fund our hosting fees on AWS as well as the following key individuals for making Nodester what it is today: Chris Matthieu, Contra, Dav Glass, and Daniel Bartlett.  

Our mission has been to bring an open source Node.JS PaaS and free hosting services to the market in an attempt to accelerate the adoption of Node.JS as well as to provide fellow nodesters and companies with a platform to deploy private nodester clouds.  We believe that we have succeeded on our original mission.  Now what?

Most of the original team has moved on to other projects except Chris Matthieu, the founder of Nodester.  He is still supporting the ongoing operations and contributing to the code base as time permits (evenings and weekends). Despite having no funding or full-time resources dedicated to this open source project, Nodester still stacks up nicely against the commercial Node.JS hosting providers in the industry including: Joyent and Heroku! There is even a new commercial offering called CloudNode that is built on top of the Nodester PaaS.  Here is the hosting services matrix maintained on Joyent’s repo:

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Node-Hosting

We still have big ideas for Nodester including:

• Better sandboxing with support for any version of node.js
• NPM installer for dead simple private cloud deployments
• Public Amazon Machine Image availability
• Admin panel for an easier browser-based view of your account
• Horizontal scaling of the platform with application auto-scaling capabilities
• OpenStack Integration for simple Rackspace deployments

The community has big ideas for Nodester too but we need your help to continue to support the service and contribute to advancing our open source Node.JS PaaS forward! Every little bit helps from ideas to documentation to working on the admin panel or installer to even jumping into the core Nodester code base on github. In addition to Node.JS development assistance, we are also looking for a few strong Linux system engineers to help us maintain the nodester.com service platform as well as assist us with new sandboxing techniques such as deploying LXC containers or other innovative ideas.

What’s in it for you? How about: Nodester fame, contributing back to the Node.JS community, solving interesting new PaaS problems, working with cutting-edge technology, free Node.JS hosting resources and all of the Nodester stickers that you can pass out to your friends.

Rocketeers Wanted: If you are interested in becoming a Nodester Rocketeer, please contact Chris Matthieu via Twitter or email him at chris [at] nodester.com.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

H A C K     T H E     P L A N E T     !     !     !

Deploying an Existing Node.JS App to Nodester

Do you have an existing Node.JS application and a Nodester Node.JS hosting account? Cool! Let’s walk through getting that app deployed for you.

1. Open your command line and cd into your app directory

2. Run “nodester app create <appname>”. (Note: If your starting javascript file is NOT server.js, add its name after the appname on the create command)

3. Update your app’s port address to match the one we assigned via the create app command. (Note: If your app uses websockets, set your client app to use port 80.)

4. Run “nodester app info <appname>”

5. Assuming you already have a git repo, add a nodester remote by running “git remote add nodester <git repo from info command>”.  If you do not have a git repo already, first run “git init” followed by “git add .” and git commit -m “initial commit”

6. Run “git push nodester master”.  This will push and run your existing app to Nodester where it can be reached at http://<appname>.nodester.com.

Does your application use any NPM modules?  If so, you will need to install them to your app’s sandbox and restart your application using the following commands:

7. Run “nodester npm install <appname> <module>”

8. Run “nodester app restart <appname>”

Subsequent git pushes update your Nodester app and restarts it automatically for you. Easy as that :)

Dotting your Apps

Quick test with dots in appnames/subdomains passes! Checkout http://node.js.nodester.com/

There is nothing to do differently than creating a standard app on nodester.  

nodester app create node.js

nodester app init node.js

\m/ nodester out \m/

Nodester Proxy Gets Bouncy!

We are happy to report that things are running more smoothly on the Nodester open source PaaS since we replaced the node-http-proxy with @substack’s Bouncy proxy!

No more memory leaks or socket.io websocket hacks. Not to mention that our proxy.js file is now only 60 lines!

We are actively working on Nodester Version 2.0 so stay tuned for some awesome updates…