tflookup – Developer Diary Part 5

Dear Diary!

MY LOOKUP APP WORKS! Yayy!

Locally at least.

But what good is a web app, if you can only enjoy it yourself?

So I needed a way to deploy my app automatically (and for free).

Luckily, Heroku is around. Heroku is a simple app hosting provider, which hosts very simple apps for free. They connect to your github repository and deploy the app that’s there.

Very simple.

Wrong

I guess, that’s true for most apps, but I had some difficulties:

• I had a frontend and a backend to compile before starting the app
• I had to download the prerendered index before starting the app

Heroku’s documentation is also quite extensive. However, I couldn’t get my head around their release stage. All my tries to configure the releases right didn’t work.

So finally, I simply wrapped my complete application into a docker container (which was good nonetheless) and used that to deploy the final app to Heroku using Herokus container deployment feature.

And now, my dear diary, I have to end my writings. I have finally made my lookup app. It’s still not shiny or stable, but it works and I’m quite happy with it.

If anybody reading this might find it interesting and want to use it, they can all find it here:

https://tflookup.herokuapp.com/

Yours
Dennis

The End

This post is one of five posts from the tflookup developer diary series

Cover Image: „diary writing“ by Fredrik Rubensson

Originally published to dev.to