Deploy on Heroku

Start by signing up on Heroku

Select Create a new app and in the next screen, choose the name of your app.

It will be the name used in the URL to access your app, so choose wisely!

Also, select Europe as a region.

Go to your Account settings page and add a credit card. It will not be charged, as long as you don't pick any paid add-on.

Go back to your app's overview page and select Configure Add-ons, type MongoDB and select mLab MongoDB, with the free Sandbox option.

You need to make sure that you have all the variables that are in your .env are also saved in Heroku, in the Config Vars section of the Settings tab.

So click on the Settings tab and then on the RevealConfigVars tab. There you enter the configuration variables.

When you are running your app in development it is localhost, in production it should be the address that you can get by clicking on the Settings tab and then Reveal Config Vars.

You can see there is already a MONGODB_URI variable configured, so just add this to your mongoose connection link wherever you need it in your project:

The MONGODB_URI variable on heroku will look something like this:

mongodb://heroku_s5t34q0n:1hspkmkdnoddpj4tchb01na9ai@ds0345969.mlab.com:29969/heroku_s5t34q0n

And in your project:

mongoose
  .connect(process.env.MONGODB_URI || "mongodb://localhost/movie-project" ...)

(without the ... of course...)

Possible Problem with the Mongo connection URI

2019-07-04T20:56:06.674574+00:00 app[web.1]:     at TCPConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1106:14)
2019-07-04T20:56:06.674575+00:00 app[web.1]:   errno: 'ECONNREFUSED',
2019-07-04T20:56:06.674576+00:00 app[web.1]:   code: 'ECONNREFUSED',
2019-07-04T20:56:06.674577+00:00 app[web.1]:   syscall: 'connect',
2019-07-04T20:56:06.674578+00:00 app[web.1]:   address: '127.0.0.1',
2019-07-04T20:56:06.674580+00:00 app[web.1]:   port: 27017 }

This means you are trying to connect to MongoDB via localhost. You need to make sure you are using the correct url.

Commit the changes and push to the master branch, this should deploy again.

Deploy from GitHub

Now, click on the Deploy tab and Connect to GitHub.

Select your repo from Github (make sure that your package.json is at the root of your repository) and enable Automatic Deploys.

For the first time, select the manual deploy to deploy your master branch.

If there is an error, select More > View Logs.

Connect to a GUI

To visualize your database on Compass or Studio3T start by copying the MONGODB_URI config variable from the Settings tab.

Compass

You should get a prompt asking if you want to use the URI in your clipboard. Accept and then change the following field: authentication database which is set as admin and use the value in the username field instead.

Studio3T