There is a quickstart repository for Heroku: https://github.com/orangy/ktor-heroku-start
For using Heroku, you will need Java, Maven/Gradle and the Heroku CLI
You will also need to configure your public key in the Heroku configuration.
You can try the heroku --version command to see if you have the command line installed:
> heroku --version
heroku-cli/6.15.36 (darwin-x64) node-v9.9.0
You will also need an app.json file describing your projects and your dependencies:
{
"name": "Start on Heroku: Kotlin",
"description": "A barebones Kotlin app, which can easily be deployed to Heroku.",
"image": "heroku/java",
"addons": [ "heroku-postgresql" ]
}
You will also need a Procfile describing what to execute:
web: java -jar target/helloworld.jar
And a system.properties file describing your java version:
java.runtime.version=1.8
And a file called .env along with the other files(required for development).
This will contain environment variables that Heroku will pass to the application.
For example, for the quickstart:
PORT=8080
JDBC_DATABASE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/java_database_name
If your local installation of postgresql has a user/password, you have to change the jdbc url too:
JDBC_DATABASE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/java_database_name?user=user&password=password
You will also first need to create the database:
> psql -c "CREATE DATABASE java_database_name;"
CREATE DATABASE
With these files, you can use Gradle or Maven to create a fat-jar and adjust the Procfile
to point to the right file.
After building the jar, in Unix systems you can use heroku local:start to start your server.
You first have to create an app or set the git remote. heroku create will create an app
with a random available name and it will set a git remote of the repo.
After calling heroku create, you should see something like this:
> heroku create
Creating app... done, ⬢ demo-demo-12345
https://demo-demo-12345.herokuapp.com/ | https://git.heroku.com/demo-demo-12345.git
This effectively adds a heroku remote to your git clone:
> cat .git/config
...
[remote "heroku"]
url = https://git.heroku.com/demo-demo-12345.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/heroku/*
After that, you have to push your git changes to the heroku remote. And it does a build on push:
> git push heroku master
Counting objects: 90, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (59/59), done.
Writing objects: 100% (90/90), 183.08 KiB | 5.55 MiB/s, done.
Total 90 (delta 21), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Compressing source files... done.
remote: Building source:
remote:
remote: -----> Java app detected
remote: -----> Installing JDK 1.8... done
remote: -----> Executing: ./mvnw -DskipTests clean dependency:list install
...
remote: [INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
remote: [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
remote: [INFO] Total time: 49.698 s
remote: [INFO] Finished at: 2018-03-23T04:33:01+00:00
remote: [INFO] Final Memory: 41M/399M
remote: [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
remote: -----> Discovering process types
remote: Procfile declares types -> web
remote:
remote: -----> Compressing...
remote: Done: 60.7M
remote: -----> Launching...
remote: Released v4
remote: https://demo-demo-12345.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku
remote:
remote: Verifying deploy... done.
To https://git.heroku.com/demo-demo-12345.git
* [new branch] master -> master
Now you can execute heroku open to open your application in your browser:
heroku open
In this case, it will open: https://demo-demo-12345.herokuapp.com/
If you encountered:
remote: ! ERROR: Failed to run Gradle!
remote: It looks like your project does not contain a 'stage' task, which Heroku needs in order
remote: to build your app.
It probably means that Heroku doesn’t know how to build your app and you have to set it manually. For example, if you used shadowJar you have to set it using:
> heroku config:set GRADLE_TASK="shadowJar"
Setting GRADLE_TASK and restarting ⬢ demo-demo-12345... done, v4
GRADLE_TASK: shadowJar
Remember that Heroku sets an environment variable called PORT which you have to bind to instead of
a fixed port.
When using embeddedServer you will have to use System.getenv, while when using application.conf you will
have to set ktor.deployment.port = ${PORT}.
Check out the page about
using environment variables in the configuration
for more information.