AngularJS Continuous Deployment Tools

Question

I have been trying out Codeship and Heroku for continuous deployment of an AngularJS application I writing at the moment. The app was created using Yeoman and uses bower and grunt. Initially I thought this seemed like a really good setup as Codeship was free to use and I was quickly able to configure this to build my AngularJS project and it offered the ability to add a deployment step after the build. There were even many PaaS providers to choose from (Heroku, S3, Google App Engine etc). However I seem to have become a bit stuck with getting the app to run on Heroku.

The problem started from the fact that all the documentation suggested that I remove the /dist path from my .gitignore so that this directory is published to Heroku post build. This was mainly from documentation that talked about publishing to Heroku from a local machine, but I figure this is all Codeship is doing under the hood anyway. I didn't want to do this as I don't believe I should be checking build output into source control. The /dist folder was added to .gitignore for a good reason. Furthermore, this kind of defeats the point of having a CI server somewhat, as I might as well just push the latest build from my machine.

After some more digging around I found out that I could add a postinstall step to my packages.json file such as bower install && grunt build which would re-run the build on Heroku and hence repopulate all the bower dependencies (something else they wanted me to check in to source control!) and the dist directory.

After giving this a try it became apparent that I would need to add bower and grunt as dependencies in packages.json, which meant moving them from devDependencies which is where they should belong!

So I now seem to be stuck. All I want to do is publish my build artefacts (/dist) the dependencies (/bower_components) and the server.js file that will run the site. Does anyone know how to achieve this with Heroku and Codeship? Alternatively has anyone had any success with this using different tools. I am looking for something that is free and I am willing to accept that it will not be production stable (won't scale to multiple servers etc), but this is fine for now as all I want to do is continuously deploy the app for internal testing and to be able to share the output with non-technical members of my team so we can discuss features we'd like to prioritise etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Ahoy, Marko from the Codeship crew here. Did you already send us an in app message about this? I'm sure we can get your application building on Codeship and deploying to Heroku successfully.

As a very short answer, the easiest way to get this running would be to add both bower and grunt to your dependencies in the package.json. Another possibility would be to look for a custom buildpack with both tools already installed.

And finally you could also run the tools on Codeship, add the newly installed files to the repository, commit the changes and push this new commit to Heroku. If you want to use this, you'd very probably need to force push the changes though.

Feel free to reach out to me via the in app messenger (lower right corner of the site) and I'd be happy to help you get this working!