Six Strategies for Deploying to Heroku

Summary

Heroku offers six deployment strategies: Git push, GitHub integration, Review Apps, Docker, Terraform, and the “Deploy to Heroku” button. Each has different requirements and trade-offs, and strategies can be combined in a workflow. Git push is simple but requires a developer with access to both repository and app, while GitHub integration can automate deployments and block them until CI tests pass. Review Apps provide disposable instances for pull requests; Docker supplies self-contained environments but requires maintaining a stack and does not support pipeline promotions. Terraform uses declarative HCL to manage Heroku and external infrastructure despite lacking official Heroku support, and buttons offer one-click deployments from GitHub repositories but do not auto-update or connect deployed apps back to their repositories.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Git deployment automatically builds the application and creates a release after code is pushed, but requires access to both the Git repository and Heroku app.

2. 2

   Review Apps deploy GitHub pull requests as isolated, disposable instances and destroy them when the pull request closes; pipelines and GitHub integration are required.

3. 3

   Terraform defines Heroku apps with declarative HCL and can coordinate Heroku resources with infrastructure from providers such as AWS, DNSimple, and Cloudflare.