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Heroku

Note: Installations to Heroku require a local machine with some flavour of unix, as NodeBB does not run on Windows.

  1. Download and install Heroku Toolbelt for your operating system
  2. Log into your Heroku account: heroku login
  3. Verify your Heroku account by adding a credit card (at http://heroku.com/verify). Required for enabling mLab MongoDB Add-on.
  4. Clone the repository: git clone -b v2.x https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB.git /path/to/repo/clone
  5. cd /path/to/repo/clone
  6. Create the heroku app: heroku create
  7. Enable mLab MongoDB for your heroku account (Sandbox is a free plan): heroku addons:create mongolab:sandbox

  8. Run the NodeBB setup script: ./nodebb setup (information for your Heroku server and mLab MongoDB instance can be found in your account page)

    • Your server name is found in your Heroku app's "settings" page, and looks something like https://adjective-noun-wxyz.herokuapp.com
    • Use any port number. It will be ignored.
    • Your MongoDB server can be found as part of the mongoDB url. For example, for the url: mongodb://heroku_b5mwv5hk:[email protected]:61391/heroku_b5mwv5hk
      • The host is ds151291.mlab.com
      • The port is 61391
      • The username is heroku_b5mwv5hk
      • The password is 8i0hd53a35qhd7bd2p8lm0m4do

  9. Create a Procfile for Heroku: echo "web: node loader.js --no-daemon" > Procfile

  10. Commit the Procfile:
git add -f Procfile config.json package.json build && git commit -am "adding Procfile and configs for Heroku"
  1. Push to heroku: git push -u heroku v2.x:master
    • Ensure that a proper SSH key was added to your account, otherwise the push will not succeed!
  2. Initialise a single dyno: heroku ps:scale web=1
  3. Visit your app!

If these instructions are unclear or if you run into trouble, please let us know by creating a topic on the Community Support Forum.

Keeping it up to date

If you wish to pull the latest changes from the git repository to your Heroku app:

  1. Navigate to your repository at /path/to/nodebb
  2. git pull
  3. npm install
  4. node app --upgrade
  5. git commit -am "upgrading to latest nodebb"
  6. git push

Upload Support

Given the Heroku doesn't uses a persistant storage, to avoid losing uploaded assets, remember to follow the solution in Uploads to setup a persistant storage.