What is Heroku?

One of my first questions when I was looking for a way to share my Node.js prototype was what exactly is Heroku? According to their own website, Heroku “is a cloud platform that lets companies build, deliver, monitor and scale apps … the fastest way to go from idea to URL, bypassing all those infrastructure headaches”.

heroku plus node

Basically, Heroku is a way to deploy a web app at a temporary web address, and in my case, an easy way to share my Node.js prototype. By installing node and npm, as well as the heroku CLI, I was able to update a git repository with my code and then push to a git remote called ‘heroku’. To get into specifics, I followed the steps in this easy tutorial. I won’t go into too much detail because I think the offical heroku tutorial, and the rest of the heroku documentation, does a great job walking someone through it.

Creating an app using the heroku CLI

I will say that after I follwed the steps, all I had to do was go to the link that heroku had printed in the terminal and see my app running live. This functionality is all included with the free acount.