Deploying a PARSE server to Heroku

Heroku is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that enabled developers to build and run applications entirely in the cloud. If you followed my previous post about PARSE server you will see that we are just one step ahead to move things from a self-hosted environment to the cloud. Heroku offers a free tier with 1 web and 1 worker (2 dynos - smart, lightweight containers) but they can't run 24/7 (must sleep 6 hours in a 24h period). For any additional dyno you'll have to pay $7/month. (there are also some considerations in terms of memory that can increase your final bill).

Deploy PARSE server to Heroku.

To deploy PARSE server to Heroku there are two alternatives. The first one which is the easy one where we just press the deploy button from the PARSE server example page and this would lead us to the Heroku page with the details we need to set up our system. To create a deploy button for your repo you need to follow the following tutorial.

The second one involves a bit more of configuration and I would definitely recommend you not to pursue this one. I spent one afternoon to correctly configure git and heroku to achive the same results as pushing a button.

Once you press the deploy button from PARSE server example, you'll be prompted with the following details:

Add you AppName and set the runtime selection. You will see that there is one additional addon added automatically in the app for a MongoDB database.

To finalise this step, the system will ask you to add your credit card details. There is no charge here as the deployment is for free and the MongoDB sandbox is also free, but this is one of the requirements.

Now the app is deployed and it will appear as active under Heroku:

It's time now to test the application. You can use curl, javascript or any other language to test the connectivity with Parse. In my case I will use Delphi as my preferred language and because I already have the libraries for it.

Here is my code:

As you can see this will call the remote instance of my Parse server and add a new item under Instances classes.

To see that everything has worked correctly. I can go to the remote mongoDB instance and check out the results:

And the records that have been inserted:

Now I can happily connect my devices to my remote Parse server and remove the old dependencies to Parse.com.

The second option to produce the same results involve using Heroku Toolbelt and mongoDB addon. For this, get the latest Heroku Toolbelt from here. I'm testing everything from a Win7 machine so I have downloaded the installer for windows. Then follow the steps from Heroku in terms of deploying the application through the command line via heroku and git. And you'll achieve the same results. Remember to configure your SSH key first before pushing anything through git.

In conclusion, using PaaS will change the future in terms of DevOps. Companies will rely more in cloud base platforms for their operations as the will require less worries in terms of load balancing, VPNs, clusterint, key rotation and some complex security policies. DevOps tools have matured a lot nowadays and with all this landscape constantly changing you can learn some valuable skills along the way.

There are also some other deployment solutions that I would like to try like Docker, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Capistrano. Hopefull I will have the time to test them soon!.

Related material:

• Deploying a Parse Server to Heroku.
• Public permission denied when deploying to Heroku.