Build and Deploy

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Building the app

Follow the Getting Started guide to set up the project somewhere on your server.

Please note that you have to set all the production environmental variables in this case.

Keep in mind that the tools used in this guide are used as an example but they work really well. There might be multiple other tools that you can use, so feel free to do so if you wish.

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Serving the app

This guide is tried and tested with Ubuntu. The settings should be the same on all operating systems, but some of the files and commands may vary.

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Backend

The backend doesn’t need to undergo a build process. You need the following things to make sure it can be served:

• MySQL running
• A database is created so that Chartbrew can use it (it must be empty if it wasn’t used by Chartbrew before)
• npm install ran in the server folder or npm run setup in the project root folder
• Environmental variables are set for Production (check .env-template in the root folder to see which)

Once all these are checked, we can either run npm run start, or use an external tool like pm2 to monitor and manage Node apps better.

npm install -g pm2

# starting the app in production
cd chartbrew/server
NODE_ENV=production pm2 start index.js --name "chartbrew-server"

You can also start pm2 as a cluster to take advantage of your server’s multi-threading capabilities and 0-downtime reloads. If you wish to do this, replace the last command above with:

NODE_ENV=production pm2 start index.js --name "chartbrew-server" -i max

This will then run the server on the port specified in server/settings.js.

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Frontend

The Frontend app needs to be built and then served using pm2 like above.

# build the app
cd chartbrew/client
npm run build

Create the pm2 configuration file:

vim app.config.json

{
  apps : [
    {
      name: "cbc-client",
      script: "npm",
      interpreter: "none",
      args: "run preview"
    }
  ]
}

Now you can start the front-end app with pm2 start app.config.json

Using the methods above, the app can be accessed on localhost. To serve it on a domain, check the deployment guides for different platforms in the sidebar.