Deploying Raneto to Heroku

Heroku is a cloud hosting platform which allows you to host your websites. In this tutorial we are going to use Heroku to host our Raneto Knowledgebase on the free 1 dyno plan.

Prerequisites

Before we get going there are a few things we need to make sure we have in place first:

  1. We are going to assume you have already installed and set up Raneto on your local machine
  2. You are going to need a free Heroku user account
  3. You will also need to have the Heroku Toolbelt installed

Login to Heroku

First you need to open a command shell in the root of your Raneto install. You then need to login to Heroku using the heroku login command. You will be asked to setup some ssh keys if you haven't done so already. Just follow the instructions.

$ heroku login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: user@example.com
Password:
Could not find an existing public key.
Would you like to generate one? [Yn]
Generating new SSH public key.
Uploading ssh public key /Users/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Clone Raneto and make edits

Heroku works by deploying a Git repository to their servers.
So we need to make your Raneto install is a Git repository.
This also means you will need to commit any changes you make to Git before deploying them to Heroku.
Thankfully this is easy to setup:

$ git clone https://github.com/ryanlelek/Raneto.git
$ cd Raneto/
[NOW EDIT FILES IN content/]
$ git add content/
$ git commit -m "My Changes"

Remember you will need to git commit any future changes you make before deployment.
NOTE: In the near future, we will isolate Raneto code from your documentation content (coming soon)

Deploy Raneto to Heroku

First we need to create the app in Heroku by running:

$ heroku create
Creating sharp-rain-871... done, stack is cedar-14
http://sharp-rain-871.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:sharp-rain-871.git
Git remote heroku added

Heroku will assign you a random subdomain that your app will be available at.

Next we need to "push" our Git repository to Heroku by running:

$ git push heroku master

You should see Heroku go through its deployment steps and successfully deploy your app.
Note that you will need to run the git push heroku master command after your commit changes every time you want to publish your Raneto site.

Finally we just need to make sure that we have one dyno running our web process.
This command only needs to be run this one time.

$ heroku ps:scale web=1

You can now visit your live Raneto install in the browser by running the heroku open command.

$ heroku open
Opening sharp-rain-871... done

Further Reading

Last updated on 25th Sep 2022