Hosting Your App On Heroku

Quick reference

• 00:04 We're almost ready to dive in and start building stuff, but before we do,
• 00:08 we need to talk about one more thing, and that's web hosting.
• 00:11 I mentioned earlier that right off the bat
• 00:14 C9 gives us an actual website with an actual live URL.
• 00:18 The thing about this is, it's not a production level quality website, and
• 00:22 that means basically a couple of people could come to this URL, and
• 00:26 everything will be fine, but if more than one, or two, or
• 00:29 three people hit this thing at the same time, the whole thing's gonna crash.
• 00:33 The purpose of this is just to give us a development website that we can make
• 00:38 changes and see in real-time what we're doing.
• 00:40 When we get our app finished, we're gonna wanna push to an actual professional
• 00:45 webhosting service of some sort.
• 00:47 Now, there's lots of options out there, but one of the most popular, and
• 00:50 definitely one of the easiest,
• 00:52 is something called Heroku, and you may have heard of this before.
• 00:55 Heroku is set up to host all kinds of things, but
• 00:58 primarily it's a Rails hosting service, and this is built on top of Amazon AWS.
• 01:03 The thing about this is it's completely free at a basic level.
• 01:06 The basic setup is totally free.
• 01:09 So if we go to heroku.com and click on Pricing, you can see what we want is this
• 01:14 free account here, and it's sort of like the C9 development environment.
• 01:19 It'll give you a hosting account that maybe a dozen or
• 01:22 so people can hit your website before it crashes.
• 01:24 Well, maybe a little bit more than that, but it will start to be very slow.
• 01:28 If you wanna actually ramp up your website, and make it faster,
• 01:31 and allow more people hit it at the same time, you just increase your dynos, and
• 01:36 think of dynos as horsepower, you're just giving it more horsepower.
• 01:40 So at one dyno is $25 a month,
• 01:42 and that's probably gonna be enough to get you going on for quite a bit.
• 01:45 Two dynos, $50 a month, $100 a month.
• 01:48 Unless you're getting thousands of people hitting your website all at once
• 01:52 you're not gonna need to increase this probably ever past one dyno or
• 01:56 so, but just for our purposes zero.
• 01:58 It's completely free.
• 01:59 It's gonna be more than enough, and so
• 02:00 that's what we're gonna be using in this course.
• 02:03 So go to Heroku, sign up, fill out the form, click the email they send you to
• 02:07 verify your account, and when you're ready, login, and
• 02:12 you'll see I already have a whole bunch of apps running here, and
• 02:16 we don't actually need to do anything here right now.
• 02:18 What we need to do is come back here, and we're going to go through a similar
• 02:21 process like we went through with GitHub, and you'll see just a minute here, but
• 02:25 before we do that, we need to setup a few things.
• 02:28 Come down here to terminal and type in haroku --version, and that's just
• 02:34 to make sure that this, we have the Heroku toolbelt running on our system, and we do.
• 02:40 So we are all good to go there.
• 02:42 So what we need to do is login to heroku.
• 02:46 Type in heroku login and it's gonna ask you for
• 02:51 the same email address that you just signed up for
• 02:55 Heroku with, and your password.
• 02:59 Notice that it doesn't actually type it in, it'll be hidden.
• 03:02 So see now we're logged in, and we're good to go.
• 03:04 Now we also need to add our SSH keys, just like we did with GitHub, but
• 03:09 this time we don't have to actually copy and paste them, all we need to do
• 03:14 is type in, heroic keys:add, and that'll do it for us automatically.
• 03:19 Would you like to do this?
• 03:20 Yes, boom, done.
• 03:22 Now we need to create an app on Heroku, and we do that by typing in heroku create,
• 03:28 and here is our URL, and later on I'll show you how to change this.
• 03:33 But, for now, if we copy this, and
• 03:36 open it up another web browser, it says here we are.
• 03:40 We're good to go.
• 03:41 So, we're almost done.
• 03:43 We've got everything set up.
• 03:45 We just need to make a quick change to our gem file, and
• 03:48 we talked briefly earlier about databases,
• 03:50 and our development environment database is something called SQL3.
• 03:54 But, Heroku doesn't like that, Heroku wants us to use Postgres, so
• 03:58 we need to delete this, actually, I'm gonna copy this and
• 04:02 I'm gonna come down here to development, and paste that in.
• 04:05 That's saying go ahead and keep using SQL Lite3 in the development environment,
• 04:11 but for our production environment, we're gonna use something else, and
• 04:16 we do that by typing in group :production do.
• 04:20 End, and inside of here, we wanna put in the gem 'pg',
• 04:26 and that stands for Postgres.
• 04:29 So save that, come down here, and type in the command bundle,
• 04:34 B-U-N-D-L-E, install --without production,
• 04:40 and anytime we add a new gem, we have to type this bundle install command.
• 04:46 Usally, we'll just type bundle install without the -- without production,
• 04:51 but the first time we need to do it without production, so
• 04:55 it doesn't add this pg file.
• 04:57 And there we go.
• 04:58 All of this stuff has been added.
• 05:00 The Postgres database has been added to our production, so
• 05:02 we can clear this screen.
• 05:03 Now the last thing to do is push this code to Heroku, and
• 05:07 first let's save this to Git.
• 05:09 So we type git add ., git commit -am 'added pg',
• 05:15 git push, to push it to GitHub, and
• 05:19 now we type in git push heroku master, and
• 05:24 that's the command to push our stuff to Heroku.
• 05:30 We'll use that command everytime we want to push our stuff up to Heroku.
• 05:33 Now this can take a couple of minutes up to several minutes, or
• 05:37 it can be 20 seconds or less, it just sort of depends.
• 05:40 The first time you do it, it might take a little bit longer, usually after that,
• 05:43 it goes a little quicker.
• 05:44 Okay, and now we're done.
• 05:46 So we can come back to our Heroku site, click reload, and the page doesn't exist,
• 05:50 'cause we haven't actually created any page as yet, but now we're all set up.
• 05:54 We've got Heroku going, we've got a production level quality website,
• 05:57 we've got this URL that we can use.
• 05:59 Now we can change this URL later, I'll show you how to do that,
• 06:02 but right now we've got everything set up, and we're ready to go, and
• 06:05 in the next module we'll start building out our app.

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