Change Where You Upload to Heroku From Git

June 19, 2019

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There are many ways of deploying your applications to Heroku—so many, in fact, that we would like to offer some communication on which to choose. Each strategy provides dissimilar benefits based on your current deployment process, team size, and app. Choosing an optimal strategy can lead to faster deployments, increased automation, and improved developer productivity.

The question is: How do you know which method is the "all-time" method for your squad? In this post, we'll present half-dozen of the most common ways to deploy apps to Heroku and how they fit into your deployment strategy. These strategies are not mutually exclusive, and you can combine several to create the all-time workflow for your squad. Reading this mail volition help y'all understand the dissimilar options available and how they can exist implemented effectively.

Deploying to Production with Git

Our showtime method is not only the most mutual, but also the simplest: pushing code from a Git repository to a Heroku app. You just add together your Heroku app as a remote to an existing Git repository, then use git push to ship your lawmaking to Heroku. Heroku then automatically builds your application and creates a new release.

Because this method requires a developer with total access to manually push button code to product, it's meliorate suited for pre-production deployments or for projects with modest, trusted teams.

Pros:

• Uncomplicated to add to any Git-based workflow
• Supports Git submodules

Cons:

• Requires access to both the Git repository and Heroku app

GitHub Integration

If your repository is hosted on GitHub, you can use GitHub integration to deploy changes straight to Heroku. Afterwards linking your repository to a Heroku app, changes that are pushed to your repository are automatically deployed to the app. Yous can configure automatic deployments for a specific branch, or manually trigger deployments from GitHub. If yous use continuous integration (CI), you can fifty-fifty prevent deployments to Heroku until your tests laissez passer.

GitHub integration is too useful for automating pipelines. For example, when a change is merged into the master co-operative, y'all might deploy to a staging surround for testing. One time the change has been validated, you can and so promote the app to product.

Pros:

• Automatically deploys apps and keeps them up-to-date
• Integrates with pipelines and review apps to create a continuous commitment workflow
• If you employ a CI service (such as Heroku CI) to build/test your changes, Heroku tin preclude deployment when the result is fail

Cons:

• Requires ambassador access to the repository, so it'south merely useful for repositories you own
• Does not support Git submodules

Heroku Review Apps

When introducing a change, chances are y'all desire to test it before deploying it direct to product. Review Apps permit y'all deploy whatever GitHub pull request (PR) as an isolated, dispensable example. You tin demo, test, and validate the PR without having to create a new app or overwrite your production app. Closing the PR destroys the review app, making it a seamless addition to your existing workflows.

Pros:

• Tin automatically create and update apps for each PR
• Supports Docker images
• Supports Heroku Private Spaces for testing changes in an isolated environment

Cons:

• Requires both pipelines and GitHub integration to be enabled

Deploying with Docker

Docker lets yous bundle your apps into self-contained environments, ensuring that they deport exactly the aforementioned both in evolution and in production. This too gives you more control over the languages, frameworks, and libraries used to run your app. To deploy a container to Heroku, yous tin can either push an paradigm to the Heroku container registry, or build the image automatically by declaring information technology in your app's heroku.yml file.

Pros:

• Automatically generate images, or push an existing image to the container registry
• Consistency between evolution and production
• Compatible with Heroku Review Apps

Cons:

• If your app doesn't already run in Docker, you'll demand to build an image
• Requires you to maintain your own stack
• Does not support pipeline promotions

Using Hashicorp Terraform

Infrastructure-equally-code tools like Hashicorp Terraform tin can be helpful to manage complex infrastructure. Terraform tin also be used to deploy a Heroku app. Despite it not being officially supported by Heroku, Terraform is being used by many Heroku users. Using Terraform with Heroku, y'all can ascertain your Heroku apps with a declarative configuration language chosen HCL. Terraform automates the procedure of deploying and managing Heroku apps while also making it piece of cake to coordinate Heroku with your existing infrastructure. Plus, Terraform v0.12 at present allows you to store Remote Land in a PostgreSQL database. This ways you tin can now run Terraform on a Heroku dyno storing Terraform state in a Heroku Postgres database.

For an case, check out a reference compages using Terraform and Kafka.

Pros:

• Automates Heroku app deployments
• Allows you to deploy Heroku apps every bit code
• Simplifies the management of large, complex deployments
• Allows yous to configure multiple apps, Private Spaces too as resources from other deject providers (e.g. AWS, DNSimple, and Cloudflare) to have a repeatable, testable, multi-provider architecture.

Cons:

• Requires learning Terraform and writing configuration if you don't employ it already

The 'Deploy to Heroku' Button

What if deploying your app was as easy equally clicking a button? With the 'Deploy to Heroku' push button, it is! It'south slap-up for taking an app for a test run with default settings in a single click, or to help railroad train new developers.

This push acts as a shortcut allowing you to deploy an app to Heroku from a web browser. This is great for apps that you provide to your users or customers, such as open source projects. You tin can parameterize each button with different settings such as passing custom environs variables to Heroku, using a specific Git branch or providing OAuth keys. The only requirements are that your source lawmaking is hosted in a GitHub repository and that you add a valid app.json file to the projection'southward root directory. We've even heard of ane company that adds a button to the README for each of their internal services. This forces them to keep the deploy process simple and aids new hires getting up to speed with how services are deployed.

A 'Deploy to Heroku' button.

Pros:

• Easy to add to a project's README file or web page
• Like shooting fish in a barrel to utilise: just click the button to deploy the app
• Provides a template with preconfigured default values, surround variables, and parameters

Cons:

• Does non support Git submodules
• Apps deployed via button do not automobile-update when new commits are added to the GitHub repo from which information technology was deployed
• Not a practiced workflow for apps that you need to keep upwardly to engagement because buttons tin only create new apps and the deployed app is not automatically continued to the GitHub repo from which it came

Which Should I Choose?

The method you choose depends on your specific deployment process, your requirements, and your apps. For small teams who are only getting started, deploying with Git is likely to exist your first deployment due to its simplicity. The Heroku Button is every bit straightforward, letting you deploy entire apps with a single click. If you use continuous integration or release frequently, integrating with GitHub can simplify this process even more than by doing automated deployments when you commit your code. This is a big improvement over deploying on an IaaS organization because Heroku manages the entire procedure automatically.

Every bit your requirements get more sophisticated, add the other strategies as needed. When your application is running in a production surroundings and y'all demand quality control, you may desire to add together pipelines to get the advantages of review apps, automatic testing, and staging environments. If yous need a custom stack, then you can practice so with Docker. As you add more circuitous infrastructure components, then add Terraform.

Advanced teams will use a combination of strategies: For example, y'all may cull to deploy a Docker image by creating a review app from a GitHub pull asking, testing the review app, then manually deploying the concluding version using git push.

Prepare to give one of these methods a try? Sign upward for a free Heroku account and start deploying your apps in minutes.

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Source: https://blog.heroku.com/six-strategies-deploy-to-heroku

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