Using Heroku

A straightforward setup for deploying web applications to the internet.

Introduction

We have one thing to attend to before progressing in our web development journey. We are putting in all of this hard work to make great projects, so naturally we want to show them off to the world, right? In future lessons, we will be deploying our applications to a cloud platform, Heroku. Heroku will enable us to run, build, and operate our web applications in the cloud!

Step 1: Create a Heroku account

Go to the Heroku website and create an account using the same email address you used for GitHub and Git.

Step 2: Heroku CLI

Activate your account from the email they sent you. Now, we'll install the Heroku command line so that we can interact with the Heroku service. We will use curl to download a script and run it to install the Heroku CLI. This script may ask for your sudo password, this is expected. Go ahead and type it in after running the command below.

Run this command:

curl https://cli-assets.heroku.com/install.sh | sh

This command needs administrative access and will ask for your sudo password. Enter the password of your computer account and press enter to continue.

Then, type heroku version, which should return something similar to heroku/7.5.1 linux-x64 node-v10.5.0.

Step 3: Add your SSH Key to Heroku

Adding your SSH key lets Heroku know what machine the commands are coming from, similar to how GitHub uses SSH keys.

In your terminal, type

heroku keys:add

Next, press y and then Enter. Now, type in the email address you used to create your Heroku account and press Enter. Then, type in the password for your Heroku account. Next, press y and Enter to allow Heroku to upload your public SSH key.

The terminal may read Invalid credentials provided. Just press any key and the Heroku website will open in your browser. Log in with the information you created your account with, and the terminal will reappear and accept your public SSH key.

Conclusion

At this point, we have the necessary setup to deploy our web applications to the internet. You could say... we are prepared for deployment. The only thing left to do is continue on with your web development journey by moving on to the next lesson.