Procfile guidance for adding password out of date

[vickytnz]

The current guidance says to change the procfile (which could actually say delete and replace) with

web: http-server --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD -p $PORT

However everything has been changed to _site so this needs to be

web: http-server ./_site --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD -p $PORT

As in the package file

[frankieroberto]

@vickytnz @paulrobertlloyd I’m not even sure if updating the Procfile from web: npm run serve to web: http-server ./_site --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD -p $PORT would work on Heroku – wouldn’t that then skip the npm run build step which is run before npm run serve using preserve?

I wonder if a simpler approach would be to change the guidance to remove any reference to editing the Procfile, leaving that as web: npm run serve, and then instead suggest that if you want a password, setting NODE_HTTP_SERVER_USERNAME and NODE_HTTP_SERVER_PASSWORD, which http-server will then apply by default?

Downside is that they are longer environment variable names...

[vickytnz]

I did get the above working on heroku (after 4 hours of messing around 🥴 ) - before that it either built or had a password, not both. I do agree that from my reading it started to feel like it was doing things to Procfile that should not be done to procfile, however,this is beyond my expertise, as I've already done a lot of stackoverflow just to get this to work!

[frankieroberto]

4 hours! oh no. Hopefully we can improve that for others...

Was the only change you made the one above to the Procfile in the end? I'm still not quite sure how that would run the build step...

[vickytnz]

Tried out Frankie's note and it worked:

1. Reverting the Procfile to ⁠ web: npm run serve ⁠ as per the original (i.e this doesn't need to change)
2. On Heroku, adding the following environment variables ⁠ NODE_HTTP_SERVER_USERNAME ⁠ and ⁠ NODE_HTTP_SERVER_PASSWORD  (not the standard USERNAME and PASSWORD)

[paulrobertlloyd]

Frankie’s updated guidance has now been merged. Sorry about this; easy to change something 18 months after originally building something, without realising all the different side-effects of doing so. Hopefully now this template repo npw works automatically with GitHub pages, and with Heroku, and the guidance for adding a password is more straight forward.

Thanks @frankieroberto 👍