Anyone who’s worked on a Web project would agree that it’s incredibly frustrating to try and quickly share your work with someone online – you have to mess around with configuration files, deployment scripts and spend time getting it right.
A new project, called ‘Now,’ from ex-Cloudup founder Guillermo Rauch, solves that for Node. It’s incredibly easy to spin up a public instance of your code: Just get inside the directory with your code, then run now at the command line.
Instantly you’ll get a unique URL where your code’s up and running, without any hassle. It’s unprecedented to have this little friction and is something I’ve only encountered with Heroku in the past.
You can share that link with others so they can try it out, and if you add /_src/ to the end of the URL, they can help you debug your live project as well. Here’s an example with a ‘Hello World’ app I built, that you can see the guts of in real-time.
Now is free for up to 20 deployments per month or 1 GB of bandwidth, after that you’ll need to pay $14.99 per month to take it up to 1000 deploys/50 GB. On the free plan you won’t be able to hide the source code directory either.
It’s pretty impressive to watch a full Node deployment happen with just a single command and no configuration hassle. In particular, it’ll be fantastic for open-source demonstrations or tutorials for those that are new to Node.
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