Cloud deployments in seconds — now.sh

When you need to put online an API, (micro | web) service, back-end or simply a static site, you have few well-known services to use:

• GitHub Pages
• Heroku
• Surge
• Your own server 🤓

Right?

Well, these options have more or less complexity to go from 0 to deploy and in this fast review, I want to show you now.sh: a new cloud deployments service (PaaS) from @rauchg’s company: ZEIT.

Some features of this service are:

• Easy (No complicated cloud provider setup or registration)
• Deploy node.js projects and any Docker project just adding a package.jsonor Dockerfile in the project root
• Free Plan (SSL, Backups, 20 deploys/mo)
• Full SSL
• HTTP/2
• Immutable deployments (you only can write in the /tmp path and this will be erased frequently)
• Really fast (Zeit is working hard to improve deployment speeds)

If you want to customize some server/project configurations, now lets you manage:

• Custom Domains (PRO)
• Custom DNS (PRO)
• SSL Certs
• Aliases

And to do that, you have 3 (official) great tools to work:

now-cli

A CLI has written in JS so they have really simple commands to work with all features of now.

You just need to run: 🤓

$ npm i -g now

now-desktop

An Electron-powered desktop app written in JS, HTML and CSS that maintains the command line program (now-cli) up to date automatically.

🙌 Tip: With this app, you can deploy your projects just dragging it over the toolbar icon

now-client

A node.js module to work programmatically with all your deployments, domains, DNS, certs and aliases.

You just need a TOKEN and then install the now-client module in your project

💡 Get your TOKEN here

Install:

$ npm install --save now-client

and code:

import nowClient from 'now-client'
const now = nowClient('YOUR TOKEN')
let deployments
try {  
  deployments = await now.getDeployments()
} catch (err) {
  console.error(err)
}
console.log(deployments)

Basically, now is a perfect merge of the most important features of some services/options like:

GitHub Pages + Surge

• You can deploy a simple index.html or your own client-side app (angular/react/vue)
• Configure a custom domain easily (previous DNS configuration)

Heroku + Your own server

• Run node.js or Docker projects

Plus

• Immutable deployments (each deployment is unique)
• Zero downtime after deploy
• Open API to work with all their features

Conclusion

now is a great option to work with fast deployments just for test, fun or production (why not? 🤔).

Have tools that let us manage our options and configs really easily. Their community is very cool and helps to maintain our work clean.

For some doubts or questions please contact us or just leave a comment!
You can see the company services or the brochure as well.