Deploy to Heroku

To deploy your application to Heroku, you should first read their getting started with Python guide so that you are familiar with the deployment process. You’ll also need to first push your code to a GitHub repository.

Within the same directory that your application sits, in the terminal, execute heroku create. This will create a new git remote called heroku. Next, you need to add the GrapheneDB add-on, which is an easy way to get set up with a Neo4j database on Heroku.

heroku addons:add graphenedb:chalk

Next, you need to add a file in the root directory called Procfile, a text file with the following:

web: python run.py

This’ll tell Heroku to run run.py to start your application. We need to make a few modifications and additions to run.py:

from blog import app
import os

port = int(os.environ.get('PORT', 5000))
app.secret_key = os.urandom(24)
app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=port)

This will get the PORT environment variable from your Heroku configuration for port assignment. Note that debug=True is gone. You don’t want to expose your stacktrace in production. Next, change the following in models.py:

url = os.environ.get('GRAPHENEDB_URL', 'http://localhost:7474')
graph = Graph(url + '/db/data/')

This will get the GRAPHENEDB_URL environment variable that is present in your Heroku configuation after adding the GrapheneDB add-on.

Finally, git push heroku master will deploy your application.