DEPLOY.md

How to Deploy this Node app to Heroku from Scratch

This document describes the process of deploying this Node.js application to a production server hosted by Heroku.

Prerequisites

Download heroku toolbelt to enable heroku command line tools.

heroku login
cd ~/myapp

Configuration

Create and configure a new heroku application.

heroku create
heroku apps:rename new-app-name
# heroku domains:add example.com

Set environment variable(s). Setting NODE_ENV is technically unnecessary because heroku does it automatically during deploy.

heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production SESSION_SECRET=s0m3l0ngstr1ng123456

Production Considerations

Modify package.json to include versions and deploy scripts, as necessary. Find your versions with node -v and npm -v, respectively.

  ...
  "engines":{
    "node":"5.4.0",
    "npm":"3.3.12"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "nodemon ./bin/www",
    "heroku-prebuild": "echo This runs before Heroku installs your dependencies.",
    "heroku-postbuild": "node db/seeds.js"
  },
  ...

Add a Procfile to specify the command which will start the production web server.

# Procfile
web: node ./bin/www

Note, the Procfile invokes node instead of nodemon, the latter being used for local development only.

If using sessions, configure a different session store (perhaps pg, redis, or mongo) besides the default MemoryStore because the latter it is not production-safe.

Add-ons and Resources

Mongo

Configure a production mongo database.

heroku addons:create mongolab:sandbox

Configure the application to use the MONGOLAB_URI environment variable in production. Do this wherever you have specified mongoose.connect().

// app.js
var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var mongoConnectionString = process.env.MONGOLAB_URI || 'mongodb://localhost/notes_app';
mongoose.connect(mongoConnectionString);

Deploy

Deploy and/or redeploy.

git push heroku master