Heroku Tips

Checking the current status of things

Typing heroku apps:info can give you a lot of information about the app you are currently working with.

> heroku apps:info

=== salty-reef-52860

Dynos:

Git URL: https://git.heroku.com/salty-reef-52860.git

Owner: pconrad.cis@gmail.com

Region: us

Repo Size: 0 B

Slug Size: 0 B

Stack: cedar-14

Web URL: https://salty-reef-52860.herokuapp.com/

Setting the heroku remote

Suppose you try to do git push heroku master and you get this error message:

> git push heroku master

fatal: 'heroku' does not appear to be a git repository

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists.

>

The problem here is that you don’t have the remote heroku set up in this particular app.

There are two possible solutions:

Solution 1: Find the heroku app you’ve already created, and link this app to that repo

You can list all of your current heroku apps in one of two ways:

• Login to heroku.com and check the Heroku Dashboard

• OR, use the command line with heroku apps --all

When you find the name of your app, such as flowery-poo-23456, you can use the following command to link it to your currently cloned repo:

> heroku git:remote -a flowery-poo-23456

set git remote heroku to https://git.heroku.com/flowery-poo-23456.git

This will link the github remote heroku to your heroku app. Then git push heroku master will work just fine.

Solution 2: Use heroku create to create a new heroku app

Type one of the following:

• heroku create some-awesome-app-name if you want to name the app yourself

• heroku create if you want heroku to pick a name for you, such as sunburned-surfer-92037

This will create a new app, and link your app to it. Then git push heroku master will work just fine.

A trick to set up Heroku config vars easily

Note: This is not necessary at all. This is just for those who are curious.

If you are working with OAuth, Sessions, a Database, or an API Key, you may have set up an env.sh file to store credentials locally. The env.sh file is typically in your .gitignore so that the confidential credentials don’t end up being stored, accidentally, in a github repo. Read more about this here.

At some point, if you want to run that app on Heroku, you’ll have to set up all those variables on the config vars screen. That’s tedious though. Here’s a shortcut.

Make the following script, called heroku.sh.

Then:

• AFTER running your local . env.sh file, THEN

• run this script with . heroku.sh

It will copy all of the settings from your local environment into the Heroku config vars.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "Copying your local env.sh settings to heroku"

echo "You should have run . env.sh before running this script"

echo ""

echo "ALSO NOTE: OAuth CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET may need to be different for heroku"

heroku config:set GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=${GITHUB_CLIENT_ID}

heroku config:set GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=${GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET}

heroku config:set APP_SECRET_KEY=${APP_SECRET_KEY}

heroku config:set GITHUB_ORG=${GITHUB_ORG}

heroku config:set MONGO_HOST=${MONGO_HOST}

heroku config:set MONGO_PORT=${MONGO_PORT}

heroku config:set MONGO_DBNAME=${MONGO_DBNAME}

heroku config:set MONGO_USERNAME=${MONGO_USERNAME}

heroku config:set MONGO_PASSWORD=${MONGO_PASSWORD}

Note that for any OAuth credentials, if those credentials work locally, they are tied to a 127.0.0.1:5000 address for the homepage and callback urls.

You’ll either have to:

• change those addresses in the OAuth credential page of the OAuth provider (e.g. github.com), (might not work immediately, since changes to OAuth credentials can take some time before they take effect)

• (preferred) set up a different GITHUB_CLIENT_ID and GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET for the heroku instance, and change just those two variables from what you copied over from your local setup.