Setting Up Your Heroku Application

Hi I'm Ken and I'm a Django teacher for treehouse. 0:04 Building applications in Django isn't the most difficult thing in the world, and 0:07 you probably built a couple by now, either with treehouse or on your own. 0:11 Once you build your project though you'll want the world to see it. 0:15 Years ago deploying python and Django sites, well it wasn't fun. 0:18 I remember keeping a very long text file of all of the steps I needed to do 0:22 to get updates deployed on a site I built with a very early version of Django. 0:26 Those days are far behind us now though with platforms like Heroku. 0:30 Heroku provides all of the supporting tools your Django site needs, 0:34 like a database and web server, and 0:37 makes deploying updates a simple as pushing changes to a git repository. 0:39 Stick around and I'll show you how to get your Django site live on Heroku. 0:43 So I'm gonna start by creating a Heroku app. 0:47 So, you should go to Heroku.com and sign up or log in if you haven't already. 0:50 And what you're currently seeing is the Heroku Dashboard. 0:55 Now, this may look different when you get there. 0:58 I have sadly no control over what Heroku does, 1:01 but this is how Heroku looks right now. 1:04 So this dashboard is an overview of all the apps you have on Heroku, 1:07 as well as ways of adjusting settings for those apps. 1:11 Ar Heroku app is kind of like a container for your Django project code. 1:15 It's where you put the code that you want to Heroku to run, by creating an app 1:18 on the Heroku dashboard you're effectively reserving space in Heroku for your app. 1:23 So I'm going to click the new button up here in the top right corner, and 1:28 I'm going to choose new app from the drop down, 1:33 I could also click create a new app right there. 1:35 Now in the app name field I'm going to put in a name for 1:38 my Heroku app, so I'll call it djanoal. 1:43 In the run time selection here 1:47 I'm just going to leave this as United States because where I'm based. 1:51 If you are based in Europe or Asia, you might want to choose Europe. 1:53 So, I'm going to hit create app. 1:57 And now I'm looking at the dashboard with a Heroku app selected. 2:00 So you'll probably be taken directly to this Deploy tab, but 2:06 let's take a minute to talk about what each of these tabs on the dashboard does. 2:10 If we click Overview, then we get this Overview screen for our Heroku app. 2:14 We can see all of our configured add-ons we can see all of our dynos, and 2:18 see the activity, what we've done, 2:23 what our collaborators have done, all that kind of stuff. 2:26 This becomes more and more useful as you do more and more stuff. 2:30 If I click on resources, then I see two sections, I see Dynos, and I see Add-ons. 2:36 Now Dynos are a central concept to deploying with Heroku, 2:42 you're going to see this word a lot. 2:45 The number of Dynos that you have roughly correlates to how much computing power and 2:47 memory your app has. 2:52 With the Heroku free tier, which is what I'm gonna be using for 2:54 all of this workshop. 2:57 I'm limited to Heroku's smallest dyno sizes, and 2:58 I'm limited in the number of hours the dynos can be active. 3:02 Roughly though it equates to being able to run the app, run the project on a single 3:05 machine with about 512 megs of RAM, and I can run it for about 500 hours per month. 3:10 Exact details are in the teacher's notes, but 3:18 this free tier is more than enough to get things started and just play around. 3:20 You'll notice that there is no diners right now though because 3:25 I haven't deployed anything to the Heroku app. 3:28 Once I deploy an app with a proc file which will get to in a bit, 3:31 this section will have a lot more information. 3:35 So I'll talk more about proc files and 3:37 this section in a future video, the add-ons section right down here, 3:39 is where we can add external sources and services to the Heroku app. 3:45 Part of the benefit of deploying with Heroku is a huge range of third party 3:49 services like logging tools and data stores and all sorts of stuff. 3:52 These add-ons are specially configured to work well with Heroku app 3:57 with a very little configuration for you. 4:00 A lot of them have free tiers, 4:03 some of them do cost money, you'll investigate them each as you need them. 4:04 We're gonna add an add-on right now though, and what I wanna do is here in 4:08 this add-ons bar I'm gonna search for Heroku Postgres, and look there it is. 4:13 I'm gonna select that and 4:19 then notice these are the different price tiers, right? 4:21 So if I want just the hobby one which is what I want, that's free But 4:24 it goes all the way up to $7,000 per month for 4:28 this Private 7 database, that's just amazing. 4:32 So I'm gonna choose the Hobby Dev-Free and I'm gonna hit Provision, and 4:36 that's going to provision this database for me. 4:41 And now you can see it's down here, all right, there's that. 4:45 In creating and 4:49 developing this django project I've been using SQL lite as a data store. 4:50 SQL lite is great for local development, but it doesn't work on a Heroku. 4:55 Heroku dynos provide computing power and memory, but they have no disk space. 4:59 Only the things that are bundled into your project are available to tje Heroku app, 5:04 and you can't expect changes to files to stick, 5:08 only if they change in your GitHub repo and 5:11 your Git repo they'll stick, if they change anywhere else they will not stick. 5:13 Since we don't have a permanent file system SQLite out of the question. 5:18 And so because of that I'll be connecting the Django project 5:22 to this Postgres database, and I'll do that in the future video. 5:25 So let's move on to the tabs, let's go back to the deploy tab and here we see 5:29 the methods that Heroku offers for getting your project deployed to Heroku app. 5:34 We'll focus on this a bit more in a future video, but 5:37 if you want to scroll through here and read stuff over go for it. 5:41 The metrics tab unfortunately only displays metrics for 5:45 paid apps, which will not be covered in this workshop. 5:48 But if you upgrade it's a cool thing to check out. 5:52 The activity tab here gives me a log of all of the app specific 5:56 actions that have been taken by me or my collaborators for this app. 6:01 Right now it doesn't show a whole lot, 6:05 it shows that we created an initial release of the app down here. 6:07 We enabled Logplex, which is done by default and we attached the database. 6:13 So yeah, that's the stuff I've don. 6:19 The first two actions are done automatically when we created the app, 6:21 the third is the database we just created out of the resources tab. 6:23 I know you all picked that up, this tab will also display our deploys 6:27 once we start deploying as well as in the other settings changes. 6:31 The access tab here lets us add collaborators, which is helpful if we want 6:34 other developers to be able to deploy and manage our application. 6:39 For now though the only collaborative that's listed should be 6:42 your Heroku account, and in my case it's this one. 6:45 And the last tab over here settings controls a whole range of configurations 6:49 for the Heroku app. 6:54 Here you can change the name of your app. 6:56 You can show config variables, you can change them as well. 6:57 You can add domains and you can even delete the app entirely, 7:01 if you come all the way down here. 7:05 You wanna delete it? 7:07 You can throw it away. 7:08 The part of this page that's relevant for this workshop is up here at the top, 7:09 this config variables section. 7:13 If you select the reveal config vars you'll see that Heroku added a URL, 7:15 it added this database URL in this string over here. 7:21 That's the connection string for the database. 7:26 Most of the secret configuration for 7:29 projects that get deployed on Heroku happens to reconfigure variables. 7:30 We'll be covering those more as this workshop goes on too. 7:33 There's one last thing to notice about the Heroku dashboard. 7:37 If you click open app, up in the top right corner the page, 7:40 you'll taken to a page showing your new empty app. 7:43 In the next video I'm gonna replace this placeholder page 7:47 with the actual Django project. 7:49