Deployment

It is now time to deploy our application. For our application, we are going to deploy to a service named Heroku. Heroku is a Platform as a Service company that provides hosting for a large range of application types.

It provides a free tier that allows our application and database to support a reasonable number of users and database size. It natively supports our Postgres database and has optional "buildpacks" (third party extensions) to host our C# application.

Git Based Deployment

One of Heroku's nicer features is sending code for hosting is a familiar task: git push

Heroku will maintain a copy of your git repository and use a fresh git push to determine that new code is ready for deployment to "production."

Getting setup

You should have a heroku account setup from the installation instructions. If not, create a heroku account now.

In your project, you will have a STUDENT.md file that includes instructions on deployment. We'll repeat these steps here.

Deploying

These steps are run ONLY ONCE before you can deploy to heroku

NOTE: You must choose an app name that is unique across all of heroku. If you want to use a name that isn't available, try appending unique like -sdg or -janedoe replacing janedoe with your name.

• heroku apps:create NAMEOFAPP - NOTE: replace NAMEOFAPP with something that is unique to your project.
• heroku buildpacks:add suncoast-devs/dotnetcore-buildpack

To Setup Secrets for Heroku

Heroku stores secrets in your environment variables. You can change these from the command line or from your app's configuration on heroku.com

If you are using JWT tokens, you need to do the following:

• heroku config:set JWT_KEY="MY RANDOM STRING OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS TO USE FOR A KEY"

If you are using a third-party API you can set any configuration as such:

• heroku config:set THIRD_PARTY_KEY_NAME="THIRD PARTY KEY VALUE"

For instance, we might need these configurations. NOTE: use your real keys in place of REPLACE-THIS

heroku config:set JWT_KEY=REPLACE-THIS
heroku config:set CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=REPLACE-THIS
heroku config:set CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=REPLACE-THIS
heroku config:set CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=REPLACE-THIS
heroku config:set BING_MAPS_KEY=REPLACE-THIS
heroku config:set VITE_APP_MAPBOX_TOKEN=REPLACE-THIS

git push heroku HEAD:main

This command will push your code JUST to Heroku for hosting. This means when you make a change, you should push to GitHub as normal (e.g. git push) and also to Heroku (e.g. git push heroku HEAD:main).

You will notice that after the typical messages you get from a git push, your terminal will show more messages from Heroku. A typical git push heroku HEAD:main will look something like the following. (NOTE: The specific numbers for your application will be different than shown here)

Enumerating objects: 377, done.
Counting objects: 100% (377/377), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (367/367), done.
Writing objects: 100% (377/377), 1.43 MiB | 1.73 MiB/s, done.
Total 377 (delta 233), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: Compressing source files... done.
remote: Building source:
remote:
remote: -----> ASP.NET Core app detected
remote: -----> Installing dotnet
remote: -----> Removing old cached .NET version
remote: -----> Fetching .NET SDK
remote: -----> Fetching .NET Runtime
remote: -----> Installing nodejs 12.18.3
remote: -----> Project Name: TacoTuesday
remote: -----> Publishing your project
remote: -----> Published
remote: -----> Cleaning up
remote:
remote:  ███████╗██╗   ██╗███╗   ██╗ ██████╗ ██████╗  █████╗ ███████╗████████╗
remote:  ██╔════╝██║   ██║████╗  ██║██╔════╝██╔═══██╗██╔══██╗██╔════╝╚══██╔══╝
remote:  ███████╗██║   ██║██╔██╗ ██║██║     ██║   ██║███████║███████╗   ██║
remote:  ╚════██║██║   ██║██║╚██╗██║██║     ██║   ██║██╔══██║╚════██║   ██║
remote:  ███████║╚██████╔╝██║ ╚████║╚██████╗╚██████╔╝██║  ██║███████║   ██║
remote:  ╚══════╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═╝  ╚═══╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═╝  ╚═╝╚══════╝   ╚═╝
remote:
remote: -----> Discovering process types
remote:        Procfile declares types -> web
remote:
remote: -----> Compressing...
remote:        Done: 79.1M
remote: -----> Launching...
remote:        Released v5
remote:        https://taco-tuesday-sdg.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku
remote:
remote: Verifying deploy... done.
To https://git.heroku.com/taco-tuesday-sdg.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master

To Copy Your Local Database to Heroku

Heroku maintains its own copy of a database for your hosted application. That means that all of the local data you have won't be live on your site. You can take all the data in your local database and upload that to your Heroku copy of the database. See the instructions in the Heroku Quick Reference Guide to learn how to Push a copy of your local database to Heroku

To Deploy Updates to Heroku

• git push heroku HEAD:main

To Open Your Deployed Application

• heroku open

To Setup Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment will update your code on Heroku every time you push. You may choose to enable this mode of deploying to Heroku. However, you should know that there is a limit to the number of times you can deploy per day this way. You may only want to set this up if you are pushing code to Github infrequently.

• Visit heroku.com and go to the configuration page for your app
• Choose the deploy tab
• Select github as the deployment method.
• Select Connect to Github
• Browse for your repository
• Connect to your repository
• Enable automatic deploys

Viewing Logs When Something Breaks

Unlike your local environment, you won't be able to see any errors in your application. Heroku gives you a way to view the logs (or output) from your application.

The command comes in two modes:

heroku logs

heroku logs --tail

The version with --tail will show you the output of your code until you press Control-C. Logs with tailing are useful when you have an error when you load a page in your application.