Creating a simple Hello World Nodejs Heroku Project
PENDING PENDING PENDING TUTORIALThis is just a quick guide to follow with the tutorial of the following video.
With this tutorial you are going to be able to create a simple repository hosted in Heroku that runs Nodejs code.
Understanding the environment
If all of these it sounds like Greek to you then read this section:
What we are doing here is using a free-hosting online service such as Heroku in order to deploy there a simple Javascript project, in this case server-side or Nodejs , which will execute a simple “Hello World”.
Understanding Heroku
Heroku provides free hosting for web applications, of course this free-hosting is the entry tier of their services so it doesn’t come without some quotas and limitations, which you would be able to check on their website.
Prerequistes
Assuming that you are working on a linux terminal, with npm, git and vim already installed, the prerequisites are:
1. Heroku CLI Installation
2. Heroku Sign Up
3. CLI login to your Heroku Account
4. Downloading the buildpacks plugin
Heroku CLI Installation
Heroku has a CLI application can be installed in many ways depending on your OS but as it is written in Nodejs and available in npm we can just install it by.
npm install -g heroku
Heroku Sign Up
For that you will need to make an account with them Heroku Sign Up.
CLI login to your Heroku Account
Once you have the account you can authenticate your host CLI application with it.
heroku login
Downloading the buildpacks plugin
You need to download this two plugins.
heroku plugins:install buildpack-registry
heroku plugins:install buildpacks
Creating the Project
Open a terminal and cd to a certain path wherever you keep your own repositories locally.
cd ~/myrepos/path
Create a herokuapp and clone it to your host, for local manipulation.
heroku apps:create <myapp-name>
heroku git:clone -a <myapp-name>
Assign the nodejs buildpack, and create a package.json file.
heroku buildpacks:set heroku/nodejs
Create a simple index.js by vim index.js
console.log("Hello World");
Understanding the layer created by Heroku
Now we need to understand the following functioning.In a nutshell and to simplify it, Heroku deploys users Apps in little containers that are further compressed and deployed,these are called Dynos , just mind that we are create a simple “Hello World” project so it is not a Server that is going to be persistently running, for that this Dyno, will be of the type One-off as it is a One-off application, its code is going to be executed at a certain time to not to persist. For Noobs like me it is always recommendable to draw a little diagram of the layers that we are using.
----------- -------------- ----------- -----------
| Code |->|Package man |->|Version man|->|Application|
| Nodejs | |npm | |git | |heroku |
| ./index.js| |./package.json| |./.git/* | |./Procfile |
----------- -------------- ----------- -----------
What it means that we are writting the code in Nodejs in the file ./index.js , the package manager npm will be preparing the dependencies and will execute the build script, we will be updating our whole repository using git which will be pushing the repository to heroku server which will do it’s magic.
See the functioning of heroku analogous to the way git works, all the directives for this program and this repo will be stored in in the folder ./.git/.
So Heroku introduces two files to files to it ./.slugignore (which we are not going to see in this tutorial), and ./Procfile which will determine the type of Dyno that we are using and the action that will perform upon Running or Deploying it.
Setting up the project
We need to create then a ./Procfile with the shell command at is going to be executed upon heroku run -a <myapp-name>
vim Procfile
worker: npm run-script start
We have to specify our Package manager the action of that script.
First we check the version of Nodejs that we have localy installed
node -v
And modify the main body of vim package.json (keep the rest the same) , my version is 18 but yours may be different. Don’t specify further than 18.subversion , just add .x
"node": "18.x"
},
"scripts": {
"start": "node index.js"
},
Right before you push it you can see the log of your pseudo server by opening this command in other terminal.
heroku logs -a <myapp-name> --tail
Now just push the changes
git add .
git commit -m "first"
git push heroku master
You should see the building log in both terminals.
Ok, so Hello World, the World has been Helloed, and you can do this anytime from anywhere by just logging into your Heroku CLI
heroku fun -a <myapp-name> worker
It looks like the beginning of something beautifull :D.