deploy-to-heroku.md

Deploy to Heroku

Time to show the world what you have have built! To execute this, you can push the project to Heroku in order to showcase a live demo. Once complete you can share your demo with the world.

Create a Heroku App

Initialize git on your project:

git init

Create a Heroku account and install the Heroku CLI tool. Then run the following command on the root of your:

heroku create <YOUR-PROJECT-NAME-HERE>

Ignoring Dependencies

Heroku will attempt to install needless dependencies in your current project. Run this Heroku command and they will not be installed:

heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production --app <YOUR-PROJECT-NAME-HERE>

Static Files Server

We need a server that Heroku would run to serve our static app. Install express and serve-static:

npm install express serve-static

Next, create a server.js file at the root of your project and add the following:

var express = require('express');
var path = require('path');
var serveStatic = require('serve-static');

app = express();
app.use(serveStatic(__dirname + '/dist'));

var port = process.env.PORT || 5000;
app.listen(port, () => console.log('server started ' + port););

The code serves a dist folder in our project. This folder does not exist unless we run the following command to build:

npm run build

The command generates a build version of our app and puts the build in the dist folder.

You can test the build by running:

node server.js

Remove dist/ from .gitnore in the project root. This makes sure the Heroku does not ignore the directory since Heroku works with Git.

Configure Start Script

Heroku by default, would want to run the start script in your package.json. Let's set that up:

"scripts": {
    "serve": "vue-cli-service serve --open",
    "build": "vue-cli-service build",
    "lint": "vue-cli-service lint",
    "start": "node server.js"
  },

Deploy

To deploy, first commit your changes to Git:

git add . && git commit -a -m "Deploy"

The run the following command to push to Heroku:

git push heroku master

After the deploy process, run the command below to open the app:

heroku open