Migrating your Dash app from Heroku to a free platform
Perhaps, like me, you had many Dash apps hosted for free on Heroku. Sadly for us, Heroku removed their free tier on November 28 2022, making these Dash apps futile without paying up:
Fortunately, there are many up and coming platforms very similar to Heroku that we can seamlessly migrate our apps to. (Note: students can still access a free tier on Heroku with the Student Developer Program — make the most of it if you can!) Examples are Railway, render, and pythonanywhere. In this post, I will show you the simple steps for migrating your Dash app from Heroku to Railway.
1. Create a Railway project (no credit card necessary)
Head on over to railway.app and hit “Start a New Project”.
2. Link the Github repository that contains your Dash app
Assuming that your Dash app was hosted on Heroku, your repository should have all the necessary files for Railway to configure and deploy your app without any work! Select “Deploy from GitHub repo”, then follow instructions to link your Github account.
Finally, select the repository that contains your Dash app. Here, I am deploying ecg-dashboard, a Dash app that I wrote a tutorial for on Towards Data Science.
You should now see your application building.
If all goes smoothly, the app will be successfully deployed at an address ending with up.railway.app, shown below.
3. Rename the domain or link to your own custom domain
You’ll probably want to rename the domain to something relevant to your app. This can be done under the Settings tab. Click the Edit icon to rename web-production-xxxx to anything you like that is available.
If you have your own custom domain name (which you can buy from places like namecheap and godaddy), you can deploy the app there by clicking the “+ Custom Domain” button and entering your custom domain with a prefix. For example, if you have a personal website at janedoe.net, you could deploy the app at myapp.janedoe.net.
That’s it! Enjoy the rest of your day with your dash apps re-deployed on a free tier.
