I deployed a nodejs app on heroku over the weekend and thought the process was pretty quick. This was comparing the app deployment process on heroku with the process I went through with a web app on Dreamhost (it was a python app, with some time spent on the server side configuring things). It was truly much faster. Make it work locally, then deploy. Today I deployed on nodejitsu and it was even smoother.
Basically you just install jitsu, and then cd to your app directory and write `jitsu deploy`. Thats it. jitsu writes your package.json file for you, automatically increments the version, and lets you immediately customize the name. Pretty cool.
On the other hand when I deployed on heroku I wrote out the package.json file by hand and ended up having to change it because heroku didn’t have the version of node or some package I was using (I can’t remember if it was the node, npm, or express version I had to change), but I spent some time going through previous versions until I found one where socket.io, express, and played well together. Basically trial and error since on my local machine things were working fine. (The package.json file includes the details of what module dependencies the app has, and what versions are required of each module.)
I went with nodejitsu because I wanted to play with real time interactivity with socketio. You have to configure socketio on heroku to disable websockets and force longpolling, and I didn’t want to use longpolling.
Anyway, it’s exciting to see companies making the deployment process easier. For python apps I can use heroku, for node apps I can use nodejitsu.