Deploy to Heroku

This guide provides a practical demonstration of how to deploy the Sharetribe Web Template to Heroku. Heroku is one of the most popular cloud hosting service providers, and because of that, there is a lot of information online that can help you solve and debug potential problems with your deployment. Unlike Render, Heroku does not provide a free tier.

Before deploying your marketplace to Heroku, you need to create three accounts:

• Heroku
• Stripe
• Mapbox

Deploying the template to Heroku

Step 1: Create a Heroku account

Go to Heroku and create a new account if you do not have one.

Step 2: Create a new app

Create a new app in the Heroku dashboard.

Step 3: Change the environment variables

In Heroku, you can configure environment variables from the Heroku dashboard.

Go to the Settings page of your new app and reveal Config Vars:

Then add the following environment variables as Config Vars:

• REACT_APP_SHARETRIBE_SDK_CLIENT_ID

  Sharetribe client ID. Check this from Console.

• SHARETRIBE_SDK_CLIENT_SECRET

  Sharetribe client secret. Check this from Console.

• REACT_APP_STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY

  Stripe publishable API key for generating tokens with Stripe API. Use the test key (prefix pk_test) for development.

• REACT_APP_MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN

  If you are using Mapbox instead of Google Maps

• REACT_APP_MARKETPLACE_ROOT_URL

  Canonical root URL of the marketplace. Remove trailing slash from the domain.
  E.g. https://<the-name-of-your-app>.herokuapp.com

• REACT_APP_MARKETPLACE_NAME Marketplace name in self-hosted marketplaces is set through environment variables. If not set, this defaults to 'Biketribe', or whatever value you have set in src/config/configDefault.js.

• NODE_ENV

  Defines whether the application is run in production or development mode. Use 'development' for development and 'production' for production.
  Use value: 'production'

• REACT_APP_ENV

  A more fine-grained env definition than NODE_ENV. For example, this sends environment info to the logging service Sentry. (If you have enabled it with REACT_APP_SENTRY_DSN).
  For this setup, use value: 'development'

• REACT_APP_SHARETRIBE_USING_SSL

  Redirect HTTP to HTTPS?
  Use value: true

• SERVER_SHARETRIBE_TRUST_PROXY

  Set this when running the app behind a reverse proxy, e.g. in Heroku.
  Use value: true

• REACT_APP_CSP

  Content Security Policy (CSP). Read more from this article.
  Accepts values: block and report. The recommended value is block.

If you change these values later on, you need to deploy the app again. Environment variables are baked into the static build files of the web app - so a new build is required.

Step 4: Add a Node.js buildpack

Go to the Settings page of your new app and add the official buildpack: heroku/nodejs

Step 5: Connect the Heroku app to Github

Go to the Deploy page of your new app and connect the app with Github.

After that, you can deploy the app manually or enable automatic deploy from your default branch (usually named as main or master).

If everything works, your app should be available in a URL that looks a bit like this: HTTPS://<your-app-name>.herokuapp.com

Set up domains and certificates

Heroku manages SSL certificates automatically for new applications. You can change your domain and SSH settings in the Settings tab.

Read more from Heroku docs:

• Custom Domain Names for Apps
• Automated Certificate Management

Heroku logs

You can find your application's logs by clicking button "More" in the upper right corner and selecting "View logs" from the opening dropdown. Logs can be useful if there are problems when deploying the app.

Troubleshooting Heroku

By default, Heroku will use latest Long-Term-Support (LTS) version of Node.js. So, you might want to specify that your dev and production environments use the same Node version as your local machine when you run yarn run dev-server.

This can be done by adding an engines section to the package.json. Read more from Heroku's Node.js Support guide.

You should also check that the environment variables in your local environment matches with Config Vars in Heroku app settings.