02. Introduction to Heroku

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a cloud platform where developers host applications, databases and other services in several languages including Ruby, Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. Developers use Heroku to deploy, manage, and scale applications.

It is easy and flexible to use. It’s almost as straightforward as pushing a repository to Github, plus a few extra commands. Due to this ease of use, it's often used by small development firms, entrepreneurs and individual programmers to host their applications. Heroku is also free, with paid specialized memberships, and most services such as a database offer a free tier.

Want to learn a little more? Start here .

Getting Started on Heroku

Before we can do anything with Heroku, we need to do two things. First, we need to create an account with Heroku here and then we need to download the Heroku CLI (Command Line Interface) in order to run commands from the terminal that enable us to create a Heroku application and manage it.

After you create your account, install Heroku with Homebrew by running:

brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku

If you need alternate instructions for the download they can be found here . You can verify the download by typing which heroku .

Once you have the Heroku CLI you can start to run Heroku commands! Enter heroku login and then provide your authentication information. Now you can start running Heroku commands for your account and applications.

Task List:

I created my Heroku account

I downloaded the Heroku CLI

I logged into Heroku in the terminal