This is a documentation of my personal apporoach to building a functional node.js with heroku as a host provider.

• Get brunch.io. instruction here

• Create a brunch project.

    $-> brunch new <name of your project> --skeleton git://github.com/octapus/Brunch-Ember-Socket.io
  

• Get dependencies for the project

    $-> npm install
  

  It will build itself after the install.

• Run the server and watch the project

    $-> brunch watch -server
  

• You can then check out your browser

     http://localhost:3333
  

  You will get something like this in return on the command prompt

    info  - socket.io started
    --- app listening on http://0.0.0.0:3333
    10 Apr 01:05:22 - info: compiled in 355ms
       debug - served static content /socket.io.js
       debug - client authorized
       info  - handshake authorized xuGzgI4UBwYG-hzPVX18
       debug - setting request GET /socket.io/1/websocket/xuGzgI4UBwYG-hzPVX18
       debug - set heartbeat interval for client xuGzgI4UBwYG-hzPVX18
       debug - client authorized for
       debug - websocket writing 1::
  

  This means you have a socket.io connection with your client.

• You can deploy this to heroku by this point. Make sure you have heroku installed or follow the instructions here.

  The best thing is to test your app locally before deploying to heroku:

  $-> brunch build
  
  $-> foreman start
  

• By this point, you should have a remote heroku repository added to your git. Commit your changes to your git master. Then push this to your heroku remote repository.

  $-> git push heroku master
  

• Open your app up

  $-> heroku open
  

• Next, we will configure our Express app

Brunch - Application assembler for HTML5 apps.

CoffeeScript - JavaScript annotations.

Express - Web app framework.

Socket.Io - WebSocket for realtime apps.

Passport - Authentication for Node.js.