Deploying Realtime FeathersJS to DigitalOcean App Platform

Recently, the DigitalOcean App Hackathon was announced. If you’ve been following my articles on FeathersJS, this is a great opportunity to try out Feathers.

In this brief article, I’ll show how to launch your own Feathers instance on Digital Ocean.

Similar to Heroku and other PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) providers, with the DigitalOcean App service, it’s quite easy and straightforward to deploy an application. Digital Ocean provides a full workflow to add in environment variables, add a managed database, build on code push, and to deploy your application. If you don’t want to deal with the stress of CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) and DevOps for an application, this may be a good option.

Generate Application

To get started, I generated a basic Feathers application using the following settings:

feathers generate app

? Do you want to use JavaScript or TypeScript? ...JavaScript
? Project name ...do-feathers
? Description ...Digital Ocean Feathers App
? What folder should the source files live in? ...src
? Which package manager are you using (has to be installed globally)? ...Yarn
? What type of API are you making? ...Realtime via Socket.io
? Which testing framework do you prefer? ...Jest
? This app uses authentication ...Yes
? Which coding style do you want to use? ...ESLint
? What authentication strategies do you want to use? (See API docs for all 180+ supported oAuth providers) ...Username + Password (Local)
? What is the name of the user (entity) service? ...users
? What kind of service is it? ...NeDB
? What is the database connection string? (nedb://../data)

This scaffolded a barebones application.

I updated the index.html in /public/index.html.

Then I pushed this to my github repo.

Digital Ocean App Platform

To create a new App, on the home screen, click the Create App button.