Release container to heroku with Gitlab.ci

I recently struggled with adjusting my gitlab-ci.yml to Heroku’s 2 stage deploy process to the container registry.

Previously to deploy a docker container to heroku, you’d only need to run:

$ heroku login
$ heroku container:push web

However heroku changed this process recently to include a heroku container:release web command to allow “multiple images to be released at the same time” (see reference below).

In order to adjust to this change, here’s one way to do it: (gitlab repo)

#.gitlab-ci.yml
..............
deploy_stage:
stage: deploy
tags:
- docker
only:
- master
script:
- docker login --username=_ --password=$HEROKU_API_KEY registry.heroku.com
- docker pull $CONTAINER_IMAGE:staging
- docker tag $CONTAINER_IMAGE:staging registry.heroku.com/django-cloud/web
- docker push registry.heroku.com/django-cloud/web
- docker run --rm -e HEROKU_API_KEY=$HEROKU_API_KEY wingrunr21/alpine-heroku-cli container:release web --app django-cloud

Hopefully this will help someone, check out the references to read heroku’s official guide and motivation for this change.

Reference:

• https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/1426
• Gitlab repo: https://gitlab.com/Banzyme2/django-cloud9-dokcer