Deploying Meteor app to heroku with Meteorite and MongoLab

It's been a bit of a hassle to deploy my Meteor (0.6+) apps to heroku, so I thought I'd share my history and recipe..

I'll presume you already have your Heroku and MongoLab accounts setup as well as git set on your box. Make sure you installed Heroku toolbelt too..

This was my first try
heroku create <appname> --stack cedar --region eu --buildpack https://github.com/ondrej-kvasnovsky/heroku-buildpack-meteor.git

that buildpack is no longer valid and will fail (until rPowell's pull request is accepted), it tries to bundle with 'meteor' instead of 'mrt' and throws and error

heroku create <appname> --stack cedar --region eu --buildpack https://github.com/rpowelll/heroku-buildpack-meteor.git

This one works but sets up MongoHQ local vars and installs the Heroku plugin. So you need to uninstall the plugin and set your MONGOURL var to point to your MongoLab DB which is a bit of a hassle_

So I forked the buildpack and made it DB agnostic. Now it works like a charm. I'll detail the process.

git init
touch README.md
git add .
git commit -a -m "first deploy"
heroku create <appname> --stack cedar --region eu --buildpack  https://github.com/kazlan/heroku-buildpack-meteorite.git  __Set appname and region as needed__
heroku config:set MONGO_URL=mongodb://<username>:<password>@ds027308.mongolab.com:27308/<dbname>
heroku config:set ROOT_URL=<appname>.herokuapp.com
git push heroku master

As of version 0.6.6.1 of Meteor I needed to add the following to package.json in the root directory of the apps

{
  "name": "App_Name",
  "Version": "0.1",
  "engines": {
    "node": "0.10.20"
  }
}

All set and deployed!

Hope it helped