Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I signed up for the free trial of the google cloud platform, and I'm stuck. My application is a node server using express. It needs to connect to a mongodb cluster. I just need to be able to serve a couple of pages. How could I do this using the compute engine. Is there a really simple tutorial to follow to deploy my app? I can't use the app engine because managed vms aren't available in Europe. Thanks.
Deploying a node.js app to Google Compute Engine really isn't all that different from deploying it on any other Infrastructure as a Service provider.
Try one of the following tutorials:
- https://gun.io/blog/tutorial-deploy-node-js-server-with-example/
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-node-js-application-for-production-on-ubuntu-14-04
- https://strongloop.com/strongblog/node-js-deploy-production-best-practice/
You'll need to spin up a Google Compute Engine VM instance, of course, to deploy to.
You can do this using the gcloud compute instances create command:
gcloud compute instances create --image ubuntu-14-04 --machine-type n1-standard-1 your-instance-name
Then, connect via gcloud compute ssh:
gcloud compute ssh --zone [zone you created your instance in] your-instance-name
You can also do both of these steps from the Cloud Console.
I just want to share one of my deployment experience. I found it's the most easy way in all the tutorials I see.
I use google cloud launcher to launch a Bitnami VM, MEAN Stack in my case. They also have a node.js solution.
Then you can follow this tutorial Bitnami Custom Node.js Application.
Basically five steps :
create the basic application directory structure under /opt/bitnami/apps.
apps/myapp
|- conf
|- htdocs
|- data (optional)
put the application code in htdocs folder
- edit the configuration file
start the application
sudo /opt/bitnami/nodejs/bin/node /opt/bitnami/nodejs/bin/forever start myapp.js
or if you use express generated project :
sudo /opt/bitnami/nodejs/bin/node /opt/bitnami/nodejs/bin/forever start ./bin/www
restart the Apache server to refresh new configuration
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
