Click to deploy MEAN Stack on Google Compute Engine Clone Repo Locally

Question

On Compute Engine, using the click-to-deploy option for MEAN, how can we clone the repo of the sample app it locally creates so that we can start editing and pushing changes?

I tried gcloud init my-project however all it seems to do is initialize an empty repo. And indeed when I go to "source code" section for that project, there is nothing there.

How do I get the source code for this particular instance, setup a repo locally for it and then deploy changes to the same instance? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

OK, well I have made some progress. Once you click-to-deploy GCE will present you with a command to access your MEAN stack application through an SSH tunnel.

It will look something like this:

gcloud compute ssh --ssh-flag=-L3000:localhost:3000 --project=project-id --zone us-central1-f instance-name

You can change the port numbers as long as your firewall rules allow that specific port.

https://console.developers.google.com/project/your-project-id/firewalls/list

Once you SSH in, you will see the target directory, named the same as you told mean-io to use as the name of the application when you ran mean init

I first made a copy of this folder where mine was named "flow" cp -r flow flow-bck and then I removed some unnecessary directories with:

cd flow-bck && rm -rf node_modules bower_components .bower* .git

All of this to setup copying that folder to my local machine using gcloud compute copy-files availabe after installing Google Cloud SDK.

On my local machine, I ran the following:

gcloud compute copy-files my-instance-name:/remote/path/to/flow-bck /local/path/to/destination --zone the-instance-region

Above 'my-instance-name', '/remote/path/to', '/local/path/to', and 'the-instance-region' obviously need to changed to your deployment's info, etc.

This copied all the files from the remote instance to a folder called flow-bck on local found at the defined local path. I renamed this folder to what it is on remote flow and then did:

cd flow && npm install

This installed all the needed modules and stuff for MEAN io. Now the important part about this is you have to kill your remote ssh connection so that you can start running the local version of the app, because the ssh tunnel will be using that same port (3000) already, unless you changed it when you tunneled in.

Then in my local app directory flow I ran gulp to start the local version of the app on port 3000. So it loads up and runs just fine. I needed to create a new user as it's obviously not the same database.

Also I know this is basic stuff, but not too long ago I would have forgotten to start mongodb process by running mongod beforehand. In any case, mongo must be running before you can start the app locally.

Now the two things I haven't done yet, is editing and deploying a new version based on this... and the nagging question of whether this is all even necessary. That'd be great to find that this is all done with a few simple commands.