What is Heroku¶

Heroku is a popular all in one hosting solution, you can find more at heroku.com

Signing Up¶

You'll need a heroku account, if you don't have one, please sign up here: https://signup.heroku.com/

Installing CLI¶

Make sure that you've installed the heroku cli tool.

HomeBrew¶

brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku

Other Install Options¶

See alternative install options here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli#download-and-install.

Logging in¶

once you've installed the cli, login with the following:

heroku login

verify that the correct email is logged in with:

heroku auth:whoami

Create an application¶

Visit dashboard.heroku.com to access your account, and create a new application from the drop down in the upper right hand corner. Heroku will ask a few questions such as region and application name, just follow their prompts.

Git¶

Heroku uses Git to deploy your app, so you’ll need to put your project into a Git repository, if it isn’t already.

Initialize Git¶

If you need to add Git to your project, enter the following command in Terminal:

git init

Master¶

You should decide for one branch and stick to that for deploying to Heroku, like the main or master branch. Make sure all changes are checked into this branch before pushing.

Check your current branch with

git branch

The asterisk indicates current branch.

* main
  commander
  other-branches

Note

If you don’t see any output and you’ve just performed git init. You’ll need to commit your code first then you’ll see output from the git branch command.

If you’re not currently on the right branch, switch there by entering (for main):

git checkout main

Commit changes¶

If this command produces output, then you have uncommitted changes.

git status --porcelain

Commit them with the following

git add .
git commit -m "a description of the changes I made"

Connect with Heroku¶

Connect your app with heroku (replace with your app's name).

$ heroku git:remote -a your-apps-name-here

Set Buildpack¶

Set the buildpack to teach heroku how to deal with vapor.

heroku buildpacks:set vapor/vapor

Swift version file¶

The buildpack we added looks for a .swift-version file to know which version of swift to use. (replace 5.8.1 with whatever version your project requires.)

echo "5.8.1" > .swift-version

This creates .swift-version with 5.8.1 as its contents.

Procfile¶

Heroku uses the Procfile to know how to run your app, in our case it needs to look like this:

web: App serve --env production --hostname 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

we can create this with the following terminal command

echo "web: App serve --env production" \
  "--hostname 0.0.0.0 --port \$PORT" > Procfile

Commit changes¶

We just added these files, but they're not committed. If we push, heroku will not find them.

Commit them with the following.

git add .
git commit -m "adding heroku build files"

Deploying to Heroku¶

You're ready to deploy, run this from the terminal. It may take a while to build, this is normal.

git push heroku main

Scale Up¶

Once you've built successfully, you need to add at least one server. Prices start at $5/month for the Eco plan (see pricing), make sure you have payment configured on Heroku. Then for a single web worker:

heroku ps:scale web=1

Continued Deployment¶

Any time you want to update, just get the latest changes into main and push to heroku and it will redeploy

Postgres¶

Add PostgreSQL database¶

Visit your application at dashboard.heroku.com and go to the Add-ons section.

From here enter postgres and you'll see an option for Heroku Postgres. Select it.

Choose the Eco plan for $5/month (see pricing), and provision. Heroku will do the rest.

Once you finish, you’ll see the database appears under the Resources tab.

Configure the database¶

We have to now tell our app how to access the database. In our app directory, let's run.

heroku config

This will make output somewhat like this

=== today-i-learned-vapor Config Vars
DATABASE_URL: postgres://cybntsgadydqzm:2d9dc7f6d964f4750da1518ad71hag2ba729cd4527d4a18c70e024b11cfa8f4b@ec2-54-221-192-231.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/dfr89mvoo550b4

DATABASE_URL here will represent out postgres database. NEVER hard code the static url from this, heroku will rotate it and it will break your application. It is also bad practice. Instead, read the environment variable at runtime.

The Heroku Postgres addon requires all connections to be encrypted. The certificates used by the Postgres servers are internal to Heroku, therefore an unverified TLS connection must be set up.

The following snippet shows how to achieve both:

if let databaseURL = Environment.get("DATABASE_URL") {
    var tlsConfig: TLSConfiguration = .makeClientConfiguration()
    tlsConfig.certificateVerification = .none
    let nioSSLContext = try NIOSSLContext(configuration: tlsConfig)

    var postgresConfig = try SQLPostgresConfiguration(url: databaseURL)
    postgresConfig.coreConfiguration.tls = .require(nioSSLContext)

    app.databases.use(.postgres(configuration: postgresConfig), as: .psql)
} else {
    // ...
}

Don't forget to commit these changes

git add .
git commit -m "configured heroku database"

Reverting your database¶

You can revert or run other commmands on heroku with the run command.

To revert your database:

heroku run App -- migrate --revert --all --yes --env production

To migrate

heroku run App -- migrate --env production