Heroku is a free hosting service for hosting small projects. Easy setup and deploy from the command line via git. The cons are that your app will have to sleep a couple of hours every day on the free plan.
- Easy setup
- Free
- App has to sleep a couple of hours every day.
- "Powers down" after 30 mins of inactivity. Starts back up when you visit the site but it takes a few extra seconds. Can maybe be solved with Kaffeine
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Create an account on
https://heroku.com -
Install the Heroku CLI on your computer:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli -
Connect the Heroku CLI to your account by writing the following command in your terminal and follow the instructions on the command line:
heroku login1 . Clone this repo
2 . Change db.json to your own content according to the json-server example and then commit your changes to git.
3 . Then create a remote heroku project, kinda like creating a git repository on GitHub. This will create a project on Heroku with a random name. If you want to name your app you have to supply your own name like heroku create project-name:
heroku create4 . Push your app to Heroku (you will see a wall of code)
git push heroku master5 . Visit your newly create app by opening it via heroku:
heroku open6 . For debugging if something went wrong:
heroku logs --tailHeroku will look for a startup-script, this is by default npm start so make sure you have that in your package.json (assuming your script is called server.js):
"scripts": {
"start" : "node server.js"
}You also have to make changes to the port, you can't hardcode a dev-port. But you can reference herokus port. So the code will have the following:
const port = process.env.PORT || 4000;
You can also use Microsoft Azure to deploy a smaller app for free to the Azure platform. The service is not as easy as Heroku and you might go insane because the documentation is really really bad at some times and it's hard to troubleshoot.
The pros are that on Azure the app will not be forced to sleep. It will sleep automatically on inactivity but you can just visit it and it will start up.
1 . Create a Microsoft Account that you can use on Azure:
https://azure.microsoft.com/sv-se/
2 . Install the azure-cli:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli
This might cause some trouble, you will see. Remember to restart your terminal or maybe your computer if the commands after this does not work
3 . Login to the service via the command line and follow the instructions:
az loginYou will be prompted to visit a website and paste a confirmation code
1 . Clone this repository and cd into it.
2 . Create a resource group for your projects, replace the name to whatever you want just be sure to use the same group name in all commands to come. You only have to create the resource group and service plan once, then you can use the same group and plan for all other apps you create if you like.
az group create -n NameOfResourceGroup -l northeurope3 . Create a service plan:
az appservice plan create -n NameOfServicePlan -g NameOfResourceGroup
4 . Create the actual app and supply the service plan and resource group
az appservice web create -n NameOfApp -g NameOfResourceGroup --plan NameOfServicePlan5 . Create deployment details. A git-repo is not created automatically so we have to create it with a command:
az appservice web source-control config-local-git -g NameOfApp -g NameOfResourceGroup6 . From the command in step 5 you should get a url in return. Copy this url and add it as a remote to your local git project, for example:
git remote add azure https://jesperorb@deploy-testing.scm.azurewebsites.net/deploy-testing.git7 . Now you should be able to push your app:
git push azure masterYou should be prompted to supply a password, this should be the pass to your account. If not, you can choose a different password at your Dashboard for Azure: https://portal.azure.com/
Choose App Services in the sidebar to the left and the choose your app in the list that appears then go to Deployment Credentials to change your password for deployment.