Introducing Heroku Button | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Heroku Button

blog.heroku.com

247 pointsovechtrick44 comments

Awesome - I mentioned this 400+ days ago when the platform API was announced! Cool to see it getting rolled out, looking forward to playing around with this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793441

EDIT: Setup was pretty smooth - one click deploy for my RSS reader now: https://github.com/swanson/stringer

Heroku should consider using SVG for the badge, just like shields.io and services like Travis CI do. The current button is blurry on a retina screen, and basic SVG is really well supported.

Here you go (we'll update docs momentarily):

https://cdn.herokuapp.com/deploy/button.svg

Very impressive

I'm not on a retina display but that doesn't look as nice. The letters are so thin they start to disappear even before using the light-purple-on-dark-purple font.

the font does look thinner but I like it (doesn't look any more invisible from my eyes)

The fact that on a Mac the font is thinner makes me wonder if you can even see it on Windows?

Judging by my windows machine and using just my eyes, yes, it's a little thinner, and no, there's no problem reading it. The faded-grey-ness of the words "to Heroku" is a much bigger legibility problem than the minor change in font weight.

You should just convert to .svg the white icon, the rest of the button will look better in CSS.

That may be the case, but there's many contexts where you'd use this button where you can't alter the page's CSS. Perhaps the prime example being GitHub READMEs.

I actually built this exact thing myself last year: https://github.com/southpolesteve/deploy_button

Here is a repo that has the button included: https://github.com/southpolesteve/lucre

Obviously I never really promoted it and I'm glad to see that Heroku built something official. But maybe someone far in the future will see this comment and remember :)

Quick edit: Here is the announcement email to the local railer's group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Mad-Railers/-1MkbbkX... To be clear, I have no reason to believe that Heroku used anything I made. Just wanted to self promote a bit.

There's a small gallery of Heroku button templates at https://clone.herokuapp.com/

I think they're still working out the kinks [1], but nevertheless, great when it works. No more 'behind' hosted demos for open-source apps, just let them instantly deploy it and play with it on their own.

[1] Tried the sample node.js app immediately, although I am getting "Deployed to heroku", viewing it throws a "No such app" - https://www.dropbox.com/s/bsl55sia46ymrwv/Screenshot%202014-...

Now it's throwing internal server error.

Awesome, can't wait for "Deploy Discourse to Heroku", "Deploy Jekyll to Heroku", ...

It would be a great "growth hack" for services like that

This is brilliant. Are affiliate links on the roadmap? That could create a great revenue stream for self-hosted projects.

Does this support normal Git links? If so, you could simply link to a Gumroad or similar site and have that send a Heroku Button link with a customized git repo where they can deploy from.

I imagine you need to set up your app to use Heroku. It's not very hard but beware that you can't write to the filesystem with Heroku so that would need to be factored in to the functionality of quite a few apps.

You can write to the file system, it's just not persistent across dyno restarts or shared across running dynos. Writing out for in-request work is fine.

Or replace writing to the file system with storing as a json object on one of many online (eg. cloud) providers.

Right now buttons only work with source code hosted on GitHub (although the button can be added anywhere). We want to extend that to other source code hosting services, though.

How about linking to a zip or tar file?

This is amazing - this is something similar to the experience I want to provide for our internal engineering team.

Most developers get stuck on packaging their app, deploying it, managing it. This is one of those cases where it "just" works.

It would be really cool to try to replicate this in our AWS setup.

Guess I know what my weekend project will be :D

Does this have to work only via Github? Any chance it can support any arbitrary Git URI?

Right now buttons only work with source code hosted on GitHub (although the button can be added anywhere). We want to extend that to other source code hosting services, though.

The challenge is that we have to resolve the [app.json][1] file to generate the deploy UI.

[1]: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/5/22/introducing_the_a...

Why not do something like the go get tool, that uses git, mercurial and subversion to try to resolve a repo by a URL and to get its contents?

The button only works with GitHub repos at this time, but if you can place the button on other sites by using the ?template= parameter to point back to the GitHub repo. If you would like to have an app.json in a non-GitHub repo (or any source in a tarball for that matter), you can use the app-setup API (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-reference...) to do the deployment.

> Note that the snippet is repo-agnostic: It can be copy-pasted without modification and will work correctly if forked to a different repo. Heroku resolves the repo originating a button click by inspecting the referer header.

Is the referer reliable enough on modern browsers to assume this? Perhaps coming from an analytics perspective, we see all types of query-string hacks so that you can attribute the sources of links everywhere... so it's surprising to see a company depend on this functionality in a product. I suppose almost all developers would be using a browser that correctly sends referer headers... is this the case?

They do mention an alternative where you can set stuff in the query string. I'd probably rather do that instead. Especially since you could easily end up putting that button out of the context of your repo at some point and have it end up completely broken.

But if I fork a repo with a button (or even navigate to different branch/commit in same repo), a manually set query string would still point to the same code. Whereas the referer headear can identify exactly the right version briliantly.

Nice - nitrous.io has had this for awhile in their Hack Button (https://www.nitrous.io/hack), and I always thought it was pretty cool.

This is amazing, it's a simple app but https://github.com/aaronbassett/Bad-Tools only needed 1 single line change to work. Really impressed although I do need to read up more on the app.json schema.

This is extremely clever. One of the reasons WordPress took off was the easy, non-technical install process.

> This is extremely clever. One of the reasons WordPress took off was the easy, non-technical install process.

Ironically Wordpress is a pain in the ass to deploy on "non persistent/deploy with git" PAAS.And uploading plugins directly through the admin is a no go in these cases.

Worpdress wouldnt deploy directly with that one click install,given the fact the configuration is hardwritten on the disk.It would need some refactoring.

You'd need at least to enter some env variables to make things work,and the app would need to detect the db state and run migrations,if not properly initalized,when using a RDBMS(since again,sqlite is out of question on Heroku).

All the same that Wordpress could easily adopt using environmental variables for configuration values to achieve this and simply use a heroku-ified version of config.php. I've used this approach for scaling wordpress sites and its never failed me.

That's 90% related too PHP. Not really Wordpress. I mean the whole setup LAMP is probably about as easy as it gets in regards to deploying something.

Howsabout an app that performs terribly and does nothing - except teach you to improve your Ruby code?

Yeah, there is a button for that https://github.com/newrelic/newrelic-ruby-kata

Anyone else having a lot of problems getting it to work. I keep getting a "Something went wrong" message with no additional information. Even if I create a minimum viable app.json, nothing seems to work.

Kudos, now that's good business: it benefits both the company (because once you're there and it works, you're less likely to switch to another host) and the users who want to quickstart something.

I think this is a pretty innovative marketing ploy. Seems to make a blog post very Heroku centric if you add this button but I see the benefits.

They should connect this to https://sandstorm.io/

I really like this idea. Now just need to figure out something to setup to use it...

this is awesome.

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