Heroku crash course

Heroku is a web service that provides (limited) free hosting for web applications in many programming languages, including Python. This document is a crash course in setting up a Python application on Heroku. We set up the example application from before.

Registration

Head over to Heroku and make an account.

Downloading the toolbelt

We need to install some programs to let us interact with Heroku. They want you to run

wget -O- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/SOMETHING | sh

where SOMETHING is really install-ubuntu.sh but blindly piping output like that to sh is a horrible idea so I’m making it hard to copy and paste it. Instead we are going to running

wget -O- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/SOMETHING > tmp.sh

And then inspect tmp.sh. We find

#!/bin/sh
{
    echo "This script requires superuser access to install apt packages."
    echo "You will be prompted for your password by sudo."

    # clear any previous sudo permission
    sudo -k

    # run inside sudo
    sudo sh <<SCRIPT

  # add heroku repository to apt
  echo "deb http://toolbelt.heroku.com/ubuntu ./" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/heroku.list

  # install heroku's release key for package verification
  wget -O- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/apt/release.key | apt-key add -

  # update your sources
  apt-get update

  # install the toolbelt
  apt-get install -y heroku-toolbelt

  # install ruby if needed (vervet)
  if ! type ruby >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    apt-get install -y ruby
  fi

SCRIPT
}

Assuming we trust Heroku, this script looks fine to run. Go ahead and

chmod u+x ./tmp.sh
sudo ./tmp.sh

to install the toolbelt.

Log in

We need to log in each session. Run

heroku login

and provide the requested information.

Initialize the application locally

Move to the application directory, and run

heroku create

This adds a new remote heroku, which we can see with git remote -v.

Deploy

Run git push heroku master to push your master branch to the heroku remote. This will re-build your Heroku application. You might need to run

heroku ps:scale web=1

to set up the instance.

Visit the application

Run heroku open to point your web browser at the application.