Heroku Deploy

This is a very simple GitHub action that allows you to deploy to Heroku. The action works by running the following commands in shell via NodeJS:-

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started
2. Important Note
3. Options
4. Examples
   • Deploy with Docker
   • Deploy with custom Buildpacks
   • Deploy Subdirectory
   • Deploy Custom Branch
5. Health Check
   • Advanced Usage
   • Adding Delay
   • Rollback on healthcheck failure
6. Environment Variables
   • ENV File
7. Procfile Passing
8. Deploying to a team
9. Just Login
10. Important Notes
11. License

Getting Started

To get started using the action, just make sure to have a Procfile or a Dockerfile in your project and then create a folder called .github and inside it, create another folder called workflows. Finally inside the workflows folder, create a file called main.yml with the following contents:

.github/workflows/main.yml

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: akhileshns/heroku-deploy@v3.13.15 # This is the action
        with:
          heroku_api_key: ${{secrets.HEROKU_API_KEY}}
          heroku_app_name: "YOUR APP's NAME" #Must be unique in Heroku
          heroku_email: "YOUR EMAIL"

Now go to your Heroku account and go to Account Settings. Scroll to the bottom until you see API Key. Copy this key and go to your project's repository on GitHub.

In your Repo, go to Settings -> Secrets and click on "New Secret". Then enter HEROKU_API_KEY as the name and paste the copied API Key as the value.

You can now push your project to GitHub and it will be automatically deployed to Heroku henceforth.

You learn more about GitHub Secrets here and GitHub Actions here

Important Note

Please Note: Git has recently announced that it is planning to switch the default branch's name from "master" to "main". For this reason, the Action also pushes to the "main" branch in the heroku origin by default and if your Heroku App is still using the "master" branch, then the Action will automatically switch your Heroku remote to use "main" as the default branch. There is No Action Needed from you, just keep in mind that this change is occurring as you continue to use the App and if you ever need to manually deploy the App, you can do so using the following command:

git push heroku YOUR_BRANCH:refs/heads/main

Also the remote_branch property no longer exists in the latest release of the Action. If you still have this as part of the 3.10.9 release. Please remove it as it may cause problems in your workflow

Please Note: While creating a new project on Heroku, do not enable the option for Automatic Deployments as this would result in an error when the GitHub Action is triggered.

Options

The action comes with additional options that you can use to configure your project's behavior on Heroku. You can setup these options under the "with" object as presented above:

Examples

Deploy with Docker

Heroku now allows users to deploy docker containers. To use this feature, simply add a Dockerfile to your project and add a CMD command at the end of the Dockerfile. This is the command used by heroku to start the webserver inside the container. Finally make sure to set the usedocker flag to true before deploying.

.github/workflows/main.yml

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: akhileshns/heroku-deploy@v3.13.15 # This is the action
        with:
          heroku_api_key: ${{secrets.HEROKU_API_KEY}}
          heroku_app_name: "YOUR APP's NAME" #Must be unique in Heroku
          heroku_email: "YOUR EMAIL"
          usedocker: true

Keep in mind that if you deploy once using docker,