Heroku is a cloud hosting platform which allows you to host your code for free (for 1 dyno, see pricing for more info). In this tutorial we are going to use Heroku to host our Raneto Knowledgebase.
Prerequisites
Before we get going there are a few things we need to make sure we have in place first:
- We are going to assume you have already installed and setup Raneto on your local machine
- You are going to need a Heroku user account (its free)
- You will also need to have the Heroku Toolbelt installed
Login to Heroku
First you need to open a command shell in the root of your Raneto install. You then need to login to Heroku
using the heroku login command. You will be asked to setup some ssh keys if you haven’t done so already.
Just follow the instructions.
$ heroku login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: zeke@example.com
Password:
Could not find an existing public key.
Would you like to generate one? [Yn]
Generating new SSH public key.
Uploading ssh public key /Users/adam/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Create a Procfile
Next you will need to create a Procfile in the root of your Raneto install. This lets Heroku know how to
run the app. Simple create a file called Procfile (with no extension) and add the following line:
web: node bin/www
This lets Heroku know we want to run a web server and the node command we need to start the app.
Create a Git Repo
Heroku works by deploying a Git repository to their servers. So we need to make your Raneto install is a Git repository. This also means you will need to commit any changes you make to Git before deploying them to Heroku. Thankfully this is easy to setup.
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "init"
Remeber you will need to git commit any future changes you make before deployment.
Deploy Raneto to Heroku
First we need to create the app in Heroku by running:
$ heroku create
Creating intense-ocean-9735... done, stack is cedar-14
https://intense-ocean-9735.herokuapp.com/ | https://git.heroku.com/intense-ocean-9735.git
Git remote heroku added
Heroku will assign you a random subdomain that your app will be available at.
Next we need to “push” our Git repository to Heroku by running:
$ git push heroku master
You should see Heroku do a bunch of stuff and successfully deploy your app. Note that you will need to run the
git push heroku master command every time you want to publish changes to your Raneto site.
Finally we just need to make sure that we have one dyno running our web process. This command only
needs to be run this one time.
$ heroku ps:scale web=1
You can now visit your live Raneto install in the browser by running the heroku open command.
$ heroku open
Opening intense-ocean-9735... done
