I’m now a fan of Heroku. How cool is it to be able to deploy a Python app to free hosting?!

But in spite of great docs at Getting Started with Python on Heroku there were a few issues I had to handle. The main problems were because the instructions assumed you wanted to start with their demo app and not your own – which meant that they only explained things like requirements.txt and Procfile after you needed to have already made them (they were already present in the demo version).

Note – I am already familiar with git so I don’t explain that here – see Starting a simple Flask app with Heroku for more fleshed-out instructions.

Anyway, here is what I needed to do at the start:

1) Change the app.run(host='0.0.0.0') line to
port = int(os.environ.get("PORT", 33507))
app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=port)

Otherwise the app would fail because of a problem with the port when I ran

heroku ps:scale web=1

Starting process with command `python main.py`
...
Web process failed to bind to $PORT within 60 seconds of launch

2) I really needed to use virtualenvwrapper and create a requirements.txt file e.g.

cd <folder with code in it>
mkvirtualenv blackbox


Otherwise heroku wouldn’t know what dependencies my app needed fulfilled to work successfully.

To update requirements.txt after changes,

cd <folder with code in it>
workon blackbox
pip freeze > requirements.txt
deactivate blackbox


3) I needed to make a Procfile:

web: python main.py

Note, this was a toy flask app so not using gunicorn etc. Probably should look into that later:

4) Setting debug mode off probably isn’t essential for deployment but probably a good idea anyway: app.debug = False before deploying.

Some other points: when developing on a different machine, I needed to supply my public key to heroku from that other machine (Permission denied (publickey) when deploying heroku code. fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly).

heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

And the full sequence for upgrading your app after the prerequisites have been fulfilled is:

1. Make sure you have the port set for heroku
2. Then git to local repo
3. Then git push to heroku
4. Then run heroku ps:scale web=1 again
5. Revert from the heroku port back to local for local testing and dev.

heroku addons:add redistogo

To add redis support – NB need to register credit card to use any add-ons, even if free ones.