AppHarbor: Free Cloud Hosting of WebSharper Apps

We have just released a new version (2.4.85) of WebSharper, our web development framework and F#-to-JavaScript compiler. The main highlight of this release is experimental support for easy cloud deployment of your applications with AppHarbor. Small AppHarbor deployments are currently free, which is great news for individual developers and small companies.

How to get it to work:

1. Set up a GitHub or Bitbucket repository
2. Set up an AppHarbor account
3. Connect the two, according to AppHarbor instructions, so that pushing to your repository notifies AppHarbor to pull, build and deploy your project on their cloud
4. Install WebSharper using the MSI installer
5. Install NuGet through VisualStudio extensions manager
6. Create a new WebSharper solution
7. Using NuGet package manager, add a dependency on the "WebSharper" NuGet package from NuGet gallery to all projects in your solution
8. Enable NuGet package restore (alternatively, use our own tool BuildMagic)
9. Push to your repository, and see it working!

NOTES: you may commit the whole contents of NuGet-generated packages folder with binaries, which guarantees successful builds on AppHarbor servers but is not recommended as it adds unnecessary bloat. It is better to not commit packages and rely on NuGet package restore (or BuildMagic) to download the packages during build.

IMPORTANT: Due to a technicality we have not yet overcome, you do have to commit all *.targets from the WebSharper package in the packages folder. You do not have to commit any WebSharper binaries if you use NuGet package restore or BuildMagic.

We are also started releasing WebSharper extensions via NuGet. This should provide a convenient way for you to install and update extensions in your projects.

Please let us know how these works for you. As always, your feedback, bug reports and suggestions are welcome at our issue tracker.