Last year, Google Cloud announced the Node.js runtime for App Engine. Recently I decided to try to get EmberJS FastBoot to run on App Engine. It turns out a basic implementation is pretty simple.

First, if you don’t already have an engines directive in your package.json, you should add one now. Then then if you project is already compatible, add FastBoot as a dependency:

ember install ember-cli-fastboot

If your project is not compatible, or you would rather use a clean app to test with, follow Tom Dale’s FastBoot Quickstart and use the resulting project for the rest of this post.

Now that you have FastBoot working, simply add the fastboot-app-server module as a deployment dependency to the project.

npm install -save fastboot-app-server

You will also need to move any other modules expected to run on the server from devDependencies to dependencies in your package.json. For the FastBoot Quickstart that means moving ember-fetch. The Quickstart dependencies should look like:

"dependencies": {
    "fastboot-app-server": "1.0.0-rc.5",
    "ember-fetch": "^3.2.8"
    }

Next, add a server/main.js file with the following boilerplate code:

const FastBootAppServer = require('fastboot-app-server');

let server = new FastBootAppServer({
    distPath: 'dist',
    gzip: true // Optional - Enables gzip compression.
});

server.start();

Then update the ‘start’ script in your package.json to initialize the FastBoot server on port 8080:

"start": "PORT=8080 node server/main.js"

The final bit of setup is an app.yaml file at the root of your Ember project for App Engine:

runtime: nodejs
env: flex

skip_files:
- ^(?!dist|server)\/.*$

handlers:
- url: /assets/
    static_dir: dist/assets

Now install Google Cloud SDK , and follow the directions from the Quick Start guide to setup an App Engine project:

1. In the Cloud Platform Console, go to the Projects page and select or create a new project.

2. Enable billing for your project. (The Free Tier includes a $300 credit, so no worries to try this out for the first time.)

3. Note the Project ID, since it is used for deployment.

4. Initialize the Cloud SDK in your terminal:

gcloud init

Then, to build and deploy, simply run

ember build --environment production
gcloud app deploy --version 1 --project PROJCET_ID

To view your deployed app in the browser run gcloud app browse.

Despite a lack of documentation on getting them to work together, it is almost as if FastBoot and App Engine were built with each other in mind. The actual unique configuration between the two tools boils down to seven lines of config in app.yaml.

The full source code for the FastBoot Quickstart project that I converted to App Engine is in my fastboot-app-engine-example aGitLab repo. Feel free to submit PRs for improvements.