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Heroku Node.js Hands On

Get Setup with Heroku

  1. Signup for a Heroku account.
  2. Install the Heroku Toolbelt
  3. Login using the CLI
heroku login

Prepare a Node.js Project for Heroku

Heroku and Random Listening Ports

Due to the architecture or Heroku's Dynos the port number that the requests will be sent to is dynamically selected. Each new Dyno instance propagates the port number in the environment variable PORT, this is how to fetch it from within your Node.js Application:

var port = Number(process.env.PORT || 5000);

Create your Heroku application

  • Through the heroku manage panel (preferred)
  • From the command line: heroku create

The Success modal

The success view

Get the git repository

In our case [email protected]:stub-test.git, then:

Add it as a remote to your current project:

git remote add heroku [email protected]:stub-test.git

Setup Heroku boot

In order for Heroku to know how it should boot up your application you need to create the Procfile at your project's root folder, here is a sample Procfile:

web: node .

First Deployment

...and every other deployment happens like that:

git push heroku master

Power up your application

This is required to kickstart your Heroku application, use only once.

heroku ps:scale web=1

Installing Addons

Redis To Go

heroku addons:add redistogo

MongoLabs

heroku addons:add mongolab

Tips & Tricks

View logs

heroku logs --tail

Setup Environment Variables

heroku config:set NODE_ENV=heroku_staging

Export Sensitive Data to Heroku

Check out this Gist on how to export sensitive data (passwords, keys, tokens) to Heroku without having them tracked in your repository.

Installing system-wide custom libraries

If you want to install a system-wide custom library on the heroku platform you are pretty much screwed. But fear not, there is a way out. Heroku uses Buildpacks to setup your environment based on the language of your codebase. You can find all the Heroku Buildpacks at their github organization, they are opensource.

With the help of the community, we are now able to mixin multiple buildpacks, this awesome feature is enabled by using the heroku-buildpack-multi Buildpack, just declare that you wish to use the multi buildpack:

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

From then on, you need to define all the multiple buildpacks in the .buildpacks file:

$ cat .buildpacks
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs.git#0198c71daa8
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby.git#v86

That way you can then search for your system-wide buildpack and include it in your .buildpacks file. For e.g. if you need the Ffmpeg library installed, search for a relevant buildpack on the web (or even better github) and just include it along with your system's offical Heroku buildpack:

$ cat .buildpacks
https://github.com/HYPERHYPER/heroku-buildpack-ffmpeg.git
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs.git

Cha ching!

Grunt build with Compass on Heroku

The buildpack you need is heroku-buildpack-nodejs-grunt-compass by stephanmelzer.

Buildpack git repo url:

https://github.com/stephanmelzer/heroku-buildpack-nodejs-grunt-compass.git