Trouble deploying on Heroku

[bcooke]

Hi Christian,

First off, awesome starting point for a Webpack app!

I've tried to follow your blog post with the current code to get it running on Heroku, but I can't get it to work. Are there differences between the steps you recommend there and the repo's current state? I see it was originally written last April.

Here's exactly what I've done:

• Added the deploy.js file to the root with the exact code from the blog post
• Added the postinstall script to package.json, which runs 'node deploy'
• Moved all the dev dependencies to prod dependencies
• Added a NODE_ENV=production config var on Heroku

When I deploy to Heroku, the app says it builds successfully. But when I run heroku open, I'm just hit with a Application Error. Here's what the logs say:

2015-10-18T06:15:44.281256+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command npm start 2015-10-18T06:15:46.529826+00:00 app[web.1]: 2015-10-18T06:15:46.529838+00:00 app[web.1]: > chalk-web-client@0.1.0 start /app 2015-10-18T06:15:46.529840+00:00 app[web.1]: > babel-node server 2015-10-18T06:15:46.529841+00:00 app[web.1]: 2015-10-18T06:16:44.564574+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Error R10 (Boot timeout) -> Web process failed to bind to $PORT within 60 seconds of launch 2015-10-18T06:16:44.564574+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Stopping process with SIGKILL 2015-10-18T06:16:45.228070+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 137 2015-10-18T06:16:45.242940+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to crashed

Thanks!

[christianalfoni]

Hi there!

Make sure that your express application sets the port to: process.env.PORT when in production, as Heroku puts the port as an environment variable.

[christianalfoni]

Just closing this. Hopefully it worked out :-)

[jmlivingston]

I had to tweak my package.json to the following for it to work in Heroku. Of course, I'm pretty sure babel-node isn't recommended for production, so perhaps an even better approach would be a pre-compile babel and then a pointer to the compiled version of the server.js.

"start": "./node_modules/.bin/babel-node server.js"

@christianalfoni - BTW: Your blog posts and repos on webpack have been instrumental for me in breaking down how it all this works. I'm using this as a starting point, but am adding a few tweaks like SEO and Falcor integration. Keep up the awesome work.

[christianalfoni]

@jmlivingston Yes indeed, have to transpile server code to normal ES5 for production :-)

Glad it has been helpful, thanks for the feedback! :+1: