Deploying Your React App To Heroku

Requirements:

  1. Node / NPM — Click the link and download the installer.
  2. Git—Click the link and download the installer.
  3. Heroku CLI  — Click the link and download the installer.

    After successfully installing the above requirements, below are the steps for deploying your react app to heroku.

Step 1 — Sign up For Heroku

Visit Heroku to sign up

This step is self explanatory, you head over to heroku and sign up. Once you signed up make sure you head over to your email and confirm your account. now you can start your deployment with heroku.

Step 2 — Setup React App

react_demo.png

Open up your React app (I’m using create-react-app) and open up your package.json file. If your using create-react-app we’re going to add a new object called engines. Inside of our engines object, we need to specify the versions for npm and node. To do this open up your terminal and type in:

  • npm -v

Press enter

  • node -v

press enter

{
  "name": "deploy",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "private": true,
  "engines": {
    "npm": "5.7.1",
    "node": "9.5.0"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "react": "^16.2.0",
    "react-dom": "^16.2.0",
    "react-scripts": "1.1.1"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "react-scripts start",
    "build": "react-scripts build",
    "test": "react-scripts test --env=jsdom",
    "eject": "react-scripts eject"
  }
}

Your versions may be different than mine, but that's fine. Once you specified your engine versions save your file.

Step 3 — Create Heroku Git Repository

With your terminal still open navigate to your React app folder and change directory into it. Now we need to connect our project to Heroku. If you haven’t already installed the Heroku CLI. To make sure it’s installed correctly run this command:

-heroku --version

You should see your Heroku CLI version. Once that is installed we need to setup up Heroku git repository by running these commands:

  1. heroku login (Enter your Heroku credentials)
  2. git init
  3. git add .
  4. git commit -m “initial commit”
  5. heroku create (You should see two links after running this command. Copy the second one)
  6. git remote add heroku PASTE THE LINK YOU JUST COPIED
  7. git push heroku master

Once you run the last command Heroku will start to run some tests on your app. If everything goes right you should see a successful deploy message. Now you’re able to navigate to your app by running:

  • heroku open

Anytime you make changes to your app and want to re-deploy the only commands you need to run are:

  1. git add .
  2. git commit -m “any message goes here”
  3. git push heroku master

Deploying Using Github

when using github for deployment all you have to do is login into your Heroku account; click “new” then “create new app” and give your app a name. After clicking create you should be greeted with a dashboard for the app you just created. Navigate to the deploy tab and sync your Github account with Heroku. After syncing your Github account and can search for the repository you want to sync with Heroku by scrolling down to “App connected to Github” section and searching for the repository you want to sync. You can also set up automatic deployment, so every time you push to the master branch Heroku will rebuild your app for you.