About 3-4.5 hours
Deployment is a fancy term for getting your website on the web. After building out your app, you might want to share it with others and to do that you need to deploy your app to the web where others can access it. In this lesson, we’ll learn more about deployment and learn one way to deploy an app.
Apprentices will be able to:
Now we’ll work on deploying your app to Heroku.
We’ll be combining your front-end (create-react-app) with your back-end (express) and deploying it to Heroku. Your front-end contains “static” JavaScript files – when you deploy to Heroku, it turns your whole React app into a couple of static files that it will serve to the browser. No matter what data you have in the database, these files will always be the same.
Your backend, on the other hand, is dynamic – when you make an API request, the backend runs javascript code to do things like reading and writing to a database. Unlike the React app, which always serves the same files to the browser, the backend will serve different information to the browser depending on what’s in the database. We’re going to combine your dynamic code (express), with your static code (create-react-app).
client and server, then move everything into the directory client:cd <my react app>
mkdir client
mv * clientserver folder you’re about to create inside your React app. This is where your API code will live from now on – don’t modify or use the old directory or repomkdir server
cp my-express-server/* server
# We need to keep package.json and node_modules at the top level.
mv server/package.json .
mv server/package-lock.json .
mv server/node_modules .At this point, you should have the following directory structure:
./eventonica-app
./eventonica-app/client/* # The code for your React App
./eventonica-app/server/* # Your express API (app.js etc.)
./eventonica-app/package.json # Toplevel package.json used by Heroku to run your app
./eventonica-app/package-lock.json # Toplevel package-lock.json used by Heroku to run your app# Make sure you use the filename you used when you created your Express API
node server/app.jsbuild or node_modules, even though they aren’t at the root. Add these lines:**/node_modules/
**/build/process.env.PORT || 3000 (Replace 3000 by a different number if your Express app was configured to run on a different port)When we deploy to Heroku, Heroku will choose what port our server runs on.
// Add this below all your other routes
if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
// Serve any static files
app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, '../client/build')));
// Handle React routing, return all requests to React app
app.get('*', function(req, res) {
res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, '../client/build', 'index.html'));
});
}This block of code only runs in production. When it runs, it will serve your JavaScript files if the URL doesn’t match an existing API.
package.json to work with Heroku by adding the following two lines to the scripts section: "start": "node server/server.js",
"heroku-postbuild": "npm install --only=dev --no-shrinkwrap && npm run build"You can replace node server/server.js with whatever you named your API code file.
Create a free Heroku account at https://signup.heroku.com/dc.
Through the Heroku web UI, create a new Application. Once you create the app, add the Postgres add-on by going to the Resources tab and searching in the “Add-ons” search box for Postgres. Click the “Heroku Postgres” option. Finally, select the free version and click “Provision”. Or you can create a new Application from the CLI. To create an application with name, install the Heroku CLI and run the following command heroku create app_name This command will only be used on an initialized git repository. In that case, the command creates the application as well as a git remote, that you can use to push your code to Heroku: ```mkdir example cd example git init heroku apps:create app_name
Install the Heroku CLI: brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku then use heroku login
Attach your Heroku app to your code by running heroku git:remote -a YOUR-APP-NAME inside the terminal at the root of your project directory.
Configure your database. Heroku will specify environment variables you can use to connect to the DB:
new Pool({
// Make sure you swap out <user> and <password>
connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL || 'postgres://localhost:5432/<database_name>'
// Use SSL but only in production
ssl: process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'
});Fill in your local database name in the Postgres URL. This is the default database URL when your app is running locally.
Use Heroku to create the database tables you need: heroku pg:psql You should use the same commands you ran to create your database locally create table events (.....) If you’ve forgotten, psql into your local database and check your table schema with \d events. Copy that schema into your new Heroku database.
Commit everything!
git add -a
git commit -m "Heroku setup\!"Ensure you don’t have any missing files: git status and commit them if you need to.
git push heroku main This takes a long time. This will print the URL your app was deployed to. Try going to it! If something goes wrong, use heroku logs --tail to debug.Lastly, we’ll configure your create-react-app client to work seamlessly with your express backend locally, even though they’re running on two different ports. You can do this by adding the following line to client/package.json:
"proxy": "http://localhost:3000/"node_modulesport to come from process.envheroku logs --tail to see what’s wrongAll done! Small differences in the way you’ve set up your site may make bits of this process not work as expected, so there may be some debugging required. Here is a sample repository you can refer to https://github.com/esausilva/example-create-react-app-express