SimpleRTApp: Deploying a Node.js App to Heroku

This article is also available on my personal blog.

This post is part of a series which aims how to obtain relevant tweets, based on hashtags, as notifications in an iOS app. You can see the main post here.

We’re going to see how to upload our app and local database to Heroku.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a Cloud Service platform which allows us to deploy, run and manage Ruby, Node.js, Java, Python, Clojure, Scala, Go and PHP applications.

Dynos are fundamental pieces of Heroku architecture model, they provide computing processing on the platform. They are based on Linux Containers.

Each Dyno is isolated of the rest, so the commands which we run and the files that are stored there don’t affect other dynos. Also they run on the required environment for the applications to be run.

How to create an app on Heroku

To be able to start to work with Heroku we can create a new account here. We do all the new account process, validate our email and login again in the page.

We have to download the Heroku client which will allow us to upload and setup our application from terminal. Here we can download the client.