Heroku command line tool

The Heroku command line tool comes with many great tools.

There is also the documentation for the Heroku CLI.

Restart my application

Sometimes you need to restart your application on Heroku. This might be because you've changed something other than something that is updated by git push heroku HEAD:main.

To restart:

heroku ps:restart

Live view the server logs

When you receive a 500 error, this means something went wrong on the server side. Just like when you run dotnet watch run you can see the server's log file. On Heroku this log file is stored by the server and we can view it with a Heroku CLI command.

To view the server logs:

heroku logs --tail

This will keep updating until you stop it with control-c

Directly interact with your production database

Sometimes you may need to directly update some database data on your production database. You can get a psql interactive command line with your production database by doing:

heroku pg:psql

You can end your session with the exit command.

NOTE: Be very careful since this gives you LIVE access to PRODUCTION data.

Pull a copy of your Heroku database to your local database

Your app has its own distinct database on Heroku. If you want a copy of that database, its tables and rows, you can pull DOWN the database from Heroku to your local database by using pg:pull.

heroku pg:pull DATABASE_URL my-database-name-goes-here-instead-of-this

NOTE: replace my-database-name-goes-here-instead-of-this with the name of your local database. This would be the name you give to pgcli or psql locally.

So if your local database is called SuperAwesomeAppDatabase your command would be:

heroku pg:pull DATABASE_URL SuperAwesomeAppDatabase

Push a copy of your local database to Heroku

Perhaps you have spent a lot of time perfecting your database locally, and now you want to send all that data to Heroku to have it use the same data.

You can do this, but NOTE that this will ERASE any data on the server and replace it with your local data. This means anything users have added will be LOST when you do this. So this is a command you typically do once before you let users access your system.

heroku pg:reset

heroku pg:push my-database-name-goes-here-instead-of-this DATABASE_URL

NOTE: replace my-database-name-goes-here-instead-of-this with the name of your local database. This would be the name you give to pgcli or psql locally.

heroku pg:reset

heroku pg:push SuperAwesomeAppDatabase DATABASE_URL

See all the configuration values on Heroku

Locally in development we use dotnet user-secrets and the .env.development.local files to configure values for dotnet and react respectively. For heroku we use heroku config. To see all the values defined you can run:

heroku config

And you will see something like:

~/dev/sdg/TacoTuesday [master] » heroku config
=== sdg-tacotuesday Config Vars
BING_MAPS_KEY:               ArcWE6Ra_ewB-efefefef7lLuureAMbOZbv0GeuiD7EfysblY3-zrLigs1pVsh_h
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_API_KEY:    5995644444461399
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_API_SECRET: cfip-8M9kMibmmmmmGET9ktDCog
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME:       suncoast-devs
DATABASE_URL:                postgres://esrunvboymjglt:21df9cf6292cdcdcdcdf386cf654b4e30d93653f74013aba648fedb8b4c0d9a7@ec2-34-192-173-173.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/daapbho704gs04
JWT_KEY:                     13452347538945723894123456757239485723948572349587234958723945872345

NOTE: Your values will be different depending on your specific application.

Set a configuration value on Heroku

To set a specific configuration you will use heroku config:set. Let's say you want to set the configuration value AWS_KEY to 123456789 you would run:

heroku config:set AWS_KEY=123456789

NOTE: Your application will automatically reload when you run this command so it will see the new values.

Open my production application in the browser

To see your live application:

heroku open