Ember-cli-integrated-fastboot NPM

ember-cli-integrated-fastboot

This ember-cli addon enables using a production FastBoot server during development. This ensures that the eventual environment that you will run your application in will be consistent.

Overview

ember-cli-integrated-fastboot overrides ember cli's serve and build commands.

serve - In development you can run ember s and start a Node cluster with livereload.
build - ember-cli provides a set of hooks for this addon during a build. We provide a default www bash script with these hooks that will be included in your dist folder. This is what you will eventually run in production and development to spin up a Node cluster and start accepting requests.

This library uses ember-alt-fastboot-app-server and is the necessary plumbing to start a Node cluster process and spin up workers. The number of workers that will be spun up will depend on the number of cores the machine it runs on. Say you have 8 cores. The cluster master will start, spin up 8 workers on the same port and round robin requests to each worker. Also, this addon is flexible in that if you dist path changes, it will pick up and notify all Workers.

Future things it will accomplish:

Producing an asset that can be deployed.
Provide tools for writing tests that run against your FastBoot application.

How is this different than the community version?

The community version doesn't come with the server (aka Node clustering) out of the box. As a result, running in development closely follows how this app will run when deployed to users! Note, many of the addon's hooks will be called in both this library and the community one. So you don't need to worry that this package as a replacement for ember-cli-fastboot. This simply complements it.

The community fastboot-app-server also uses Node clustering, but is less flexible.

Installation

npm install --save ember-cli-integrated-fastboot ember-cli-fastboot

Usage

ember s, ember build, and ember test all function with approximately the same API as upstream.

Instead of running ember s, to run the app after a build without live reload, from the command line type node dist/fastboot-server/www. If you want to use the node inspector, use node --inpsect-brk dist/fastboot-server/www. Then visit chrome://inspect in your browser and you can connect to the cluster master instance and then the cluster worker.

Specify custom start scripts for your application in a root level scripts folder. You should use fastboot-server/www as a starting point.

Here are some other package.json scripts that are useful. The postbuild command is important b/c the eventual dist that needs to be shipped to the server should have the node_modules installed alongside.

"prebuild": "rm -rf ./dist"
"postbuild": "cd ./dist && npm install"

Disabling FastBoot

FASTBOOT_DISABLED=true node --inspect-brk dist/fastboot-server/www

This will still run the Node cluster and accept requests. However, the response will just include your as-is index.html file.

Customization

You can provide your own fastboot-server folder at the root of your project. This will be eventually included in your dist folder when building your application.

├── app
├── fastboot-server
|   ├── www
|   └── cluster-worker.js
|   └── middlewares

The FastBoot instance runs in a Node vm to avoid leaking state to other instances. If any code uses Node globals, you need to provide your own www and include them with buildSandboxGlobals function. process is provided with the default www file here.