To install MUP, open a terminal window and execute the following command:

$ npm install -g mup

This will take a bit to install, but once complete, you'll be ready to configure and use MUP to deploy your application.

To run mup init, navigate to the root folder of your project in a terminal window and enter the following command:

$ mup init

You will receive a message similar to the following:

Empty Project Initialized!

This process will create two files in your project's root folder. We don't need to worry about the first file (settings.json). We will configure our app using the second file, named mup.json.

Now, we'll configure mup.json. Open the [project root]/mup.json file in an editor. The top part of the file will have our remote server information. It should look similar to the following lines of code:

"servers": [
    {
      "host": "hostname",
      "username": "root",
      "password": "password"
      // or pem file (ssh based authentication)
      //"pem": "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
    }
  ],

The host property will be the name of the server you will be accessing via SSH/SCP. If our server name was my-production-server.com, the host property would look similar to the following:

"host": "my-production-server.com",

The username and password properties are the user/pass combination you would use if you were to ssh into the remote server.

The next four properties help us to configure our server. If we want MUP to install Mongo, Node, or PhantomJS (all necessary to deploy via MUP), we can specify the code as follows:

  "setupMongo": true,
  "setupNode": true,
  "nodeVersion": "0.10.33",
  "setupPhantom": true,

If Mongo/Node/PhantomJS is already installed, you can change the preceding properties to false (which will speed up your deployment).

Next, we specify specify what we want our app to be called. This is done by modifying the appName property:

"appName": "[your-app-name-here]",

We need to specify the folder on our local machine where our to-be-deployed app is located. This is determined in the app property:

"app": "/path/to/the/app",

The last property we need to set is env. This instructs Node which ROOT_URL and PORT to run our Meteor application from. If, for example, we were redirecting incoming HTTP traffic to a localhost, on port 1337 (which is done using a reverse-proxy, such as nginx, or a virtual host, such as apache), our env configuration would look like the following code:

"env": {
  "ROOT_URL": "http://localhost",
  "PORT": 1337
},

Now let's configure our remote server with mup setup. In the terminal window, navigate to your project's root folder and enter the following command:

$ mup setup

This will install MongoDB, Node, and PhantomJS on the remote server. It will also configure our remote server environment and install some helper npm packages, such as upstart.

Let's deploy our app with mup deploy. Once the mup setup command is complete, we'll be ready to deploy our app. Execute the following command in the terminal window:

$ mup deploy