Set up your application with Heroku's Database

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages as well as RDBMS like Postgres

In this blog, you're going to learn "How to set up your application with Heroku's Database"

Prerequisites

• Basic JS, Postgres knowledge
• Account on heroku
• Heroku CLI installed locally

So we will start by creating an application on Heroku

You can do this either using CLI or through their website. We will create using CLI

Before that, you will need to login to Heroku

heroku login

After you are logged in, run the following command for creating our app using buildpack

heroku create yourappname --buildpack heroku/nodejs

Now let's integrate our app with the database, for this, hit your Heroku app, and go to the Resources tab

Search for Heroku Postgres and click to add it. Heroku also provides a good interface for managing datastores

Our next step is to deploy our code, don't worry I have a specific repository for such

Deployment

For Deployment, run the following commands in order

Initialize git in your directory

  git init

Clone my repo

  git clone https://github.com/eklavyadev/PostgreSQL-API-Heroku.git
  cd

Git add

  git add .

Git commit

  git commit -m "Testing"

Push to Heroku

  git push heroku main

In case you are stuck to any error at this moment, run heroku git:remote -a yourherokuappname and push to Heroku again

Open your app

  heroku open

Congratulations! You have deployed your app on Heroku integrated with PostgreSQL

But actually how it is connected with DB?

const dbConfig = parseDbUrl(process.env.DATABASE_URL);

If you look at this code in database.js, we are loading connection string using environment variables in Heroku which you may find in the settings tab

The rest of the code is dealing with connection, creating tables, and serving data, which is quite easy

Thanks

I hope you find this blog useful, also make sure to follow me on github

If you have any errors/complaints regarding this, tell me in the contact section