What is Heroku

Heroku is a popular all in one hosting solution, you can find more at heroku.com

Signing Up

You'll need a heroku account, if you don't have one, please sign up here: https://signup.heroku.com/

Installing CLI

Make sure that you've installed the heroku cli tool.

HomeBrew

bash

brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku

Other Install Options

See alternative install options here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli#download-and-install.

Logging in

Once you've installed the cli, login with the following:

bash

heroku login

Verify that the correct email is logged in with:

bash

heroku auth:whoami

Create an application

Visit dashboard.heroku.com to access your account, and create a new application from the drop down in the upper right hand corner. Heroku will ask a few questions such as region and application name, just follow their prompts.

Git

Heroku uses Git to deploy your app, so you’ll need to put your project into a Git repository, if it isn’t already.

Initialize Git

If you need to add Git to your project, enter the following command in Terminal:

bash

git init

Main

You should decide for one branch and stick to that for deploying to Heroku, like the main or master branch. Make sure all changes are checked into this branch before pushing.

Check your current branch with:

bash

git branch

The asterisk indicates current branch.

bash

* main
  commander
  other-branches

!!! note If you don’t see any output and you’ve just performed git init. You’ll need to commit your code first then you’ll see output from the git branch command.

If you’re not currently on the right branch, switch there by entering (for main):

bash

git checkout main

Commit changes

If this command produces output, then you have uncommitted changes.

bash

git status --porcelain

Commit them with the following

bash

git add .
git commit -m "a description of the changes I made"

Connect with Heroku

Connect your app with heroku (replace with your app's name).

bash

$ heroku git:remote -a your-apps-name-here

Set Buildpack

Set the buildpack to teach heroku how to deal with vapor.

bash

heroku buildpacks:set vapor/vapor

Swift version file

The buildpack we added looks for a .swift-version file to know which version of swift to use. (Replace 5.8.1 with whatever version your project requires.)

bash

echo "5.8.1" > .swift-version

This creates .swift-version with 5.8.1 as its contents.

Procfile

Heroku uses the Procfile to know how to run your app, in our case it needs to look like this:

web: App serve --env production --hostname 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

We can create this with the following terminal command

bash

echo "web: App serve --env production" \
  "--hostname 0.0.0.0 --port \$PORT" > Procfile

Commit changes

We just added these files, but they're not committed. If we push, heroku will not find them.

Commit them with the following.

bash

git add .
git commit -m "adding heroku build files"

Deploying to Heroku

You're ready to deploy, run this from the terminal. It may take a while to build, this is normal.

bash

git push heroku main

Scale Up

Once you've built successfully, you need to add at least one server. Prices start at $5/month for the Eco plan (see pricing), make sure you have payment configured on Heroku. Then for a single web worker:

bash

heroku ps:scale web=1

Continued Deployment

Any time you want to update, just get the latest changes into main and push to heroku and it will redeploy.

Postgres

Add PostgreSQL database

Visit your application at dashboard.heroku.com and go to the Add-ons section.

From here enter postgres and you'll see an option for Heroku Postgres. Select it.

Choose the Essential 0 plan for $5/month (see pricing), and provision. Heroku will do the rest.

Once you finish, you’ll see the database appears under the Resources tab.

Configure the database

We have to now tell our app how to access the database. In our app directory, let's run.

bash

heroku config

This will make output somewhat like this

none

=== today-i-learned-vapor Config Vars
DATABASE_URL: postgres://cybntsgadydqzm:2d9dc7f6d964f4750da1518ad71hag2ba729cd4527d4a18c70e024b11cfa8f4b@ec2-54-221-192-231.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/dfr89mvoo550b4

DATABASE_URL here will represent out postgres database. NEVER hard code the static url from this, heroku will rotate it and it will break your application. It is also bad practice. Instead, read the environment variable at runtime.

The Heroku Postgres addon requires all connections to be encrypted. The certificates used by the Postgres servers are internal to Heroku, therefore an unverified TLS connection must be set up.

The following snippet shows how to achieve both:

swift

if let databaseURL = Environment.get("DATABASE_URL") {
    var tlsConfig: TLSConfiguration = .makeClientConfiguration()
    tlsConfig.certificateVerification = .none
    let nioSSLContext = try NIOSSLContext(configuration: tlsConfig)

    var postgresConfig = try SQLPostgresConfiguration(url: databaseURL)
    postgresConfig.coreConfiguration.tls = .require(nioSSLContext)

    app.databases.use(.postgres(configuration: postgresConfig), as: .psql)
} else {
    // ...
}

Don't forget to commit these changes

bash

git add .
git commit -m "configured heroku database"

Reverting your database

You can revert or run other commmands on heroku with the run command.

To revert your database:

bash

heroku run App -- migrate --revert --all --yes --env production

To migrate:

bash

heroku run App -- migrate --env production