kysewtts / heroku-node-deploy

Deploying a node app on Heroku

heroku-node-deploy

This project deals with deploying a Node app on Heroku.

Pre-Requisites:- 1.)Node installed 2.)Git installed 3.)Heroku CLI installed 4.)Heroku Account

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Steps:-

1.)Create a repository on github and clone it in your project folder of your local machine. We will use $git clone to carry out this task.

$git clone https://github.com/kysewtts/heroku-node-deploy.git

This will initialize git in your project folder and monitor your progress. Also , git is required to push to Heroku so this is an important step. You can initialize a .gitignore file but it is optional.

2.)Create a webpage that you would be serving with Node.js Before going through to the code of Node , make sure that you create a package.json file in the root folder of your project . This file will keep track of all our dependancies in the project.

Use the command,

$npm init 

It will throw a series a questions, keep on pressing return key. (Use <$npm init --yes> in case you want the default values to be taken up.) Make sure to check the version of node using ,

$node --version

This should be the specified correctly in package.json file .

3.)In this project, I have used express framework of node. To install express , use ,

$npm install express --save

This will install express as a dependancy in package.json file.

4.)Now, we will be creating a Procfile file. This file explicitly tells the command to run our web app. Note that Procfile (name is case-sensitive , should be written exactly as it is), should not have any extension.

Procfile has this line ,

web: node index.js

5.)Now we will login to Heroku using CLI with the command,

$heroku login

This is ask us for the Email ID and password associated with our Heroku account.

6.)Upon successful login , use

$heroku create 

This will generate a name for your app and also provide you with a URL on which your app will be running. Also it will initialize a git repo to which we will be pushing our code for deployment.

7.)Now to deploy your code , use ,

$git push heroku master

After this, you will notice that your app is successfully deployed. Go to https://.herokuapp.com to see your app is action.

8.)Heroku has dynos which are used for hosting the apps. The free account that we have created allows a single dyno for our app to run. But if it doesn't work use,

$heroku ps:scale web=1

That's it ..!!!! You have successfully deployed your first app on Heroku.