Deploying a Web Application + DB

Prerequisite for this workshop

1. Have Docker installed on your machine
2. Have node and npm installed on your machine
3. Have a Github account
4. Have a TravisCI account
5. Have a Heroku account
   • Note: To use an add-on Database in Heroku, your account is required to be verified via Billing Information (You can skip this part)

1. Environment #1 [Local]

Your first step in deployment is to have a local instance of your application running on your local machine. This is our primary working environment as developers to write features into our application and see them physically. Ideally, we will need to run our web application connected via a locally initiated database.

Create an .env file in root folder with the following properties:

DB=sample-local-db
DB_USERNAME=sample-local-user
DB_PASSWORD=sample-local-password
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306

Install the required dependencies for this web app by running:

npm install

Finally, run this command to create a local dockerised version of MySQL in your machine:

npm run db:local

1a. Running a production version locally

To get the feel of how your application behaves in production, you can run this command to spin up the application locally with production settings

npm run prod

Tip: to utilise the DB, you have to run npm run db:local with the correct .env keys in the previous step

1b. Running tests

To illustrate the point of deploying untested code to an environment, we will not use the default npm test command, but instead:

npm run unit:test

2. Environment #2 [Heroku]

Making your application compatible with Heroku

By default, Heroku already has the node engine to run nodejs applications. What we need is a Heroku-ready Cloud Database for our application: JawsDB

Note:

To use this add-on Database in Heroku, your account is required to be verified 
via Billing Information (You can skip this whole section!)

Download the add-on JawsDB from Heroku and fill in its credentials in:

Settings > Config Vars > [Reveal Config Vars]

DB=__________________JAWS_DB_________
DB_USERNAME=_________JAWS_DB_________
DB_PASSWORD=_________JAWS_DB_________
DB_HOST=_____________JAWS_DB_________
DB_PORT=_____________JAWS_DB_________

Sample deployment flow

Sample Travis CI script for deployment to Heroku

Answer script below!

.travis.yml

language: node_js

node_js: 
  - 10.13.0

install:
  - npm install

script:
  - npm run unit:test

deploy:
  provider: heroku
  skip_cleanup: true
  app: sample-deploy-1
  api_key: 
      secure: $HEROKU_API_KEY
  on:
    branch: master