Deploying EdgeDB to Heroku​

Prerequisites​

• Heroku account

• heroku CLI (install)

• Node.js (install)

Setup​

First copy the code, initialize a new git repo, and create a new heroku app.

$ 

npx degit 'edgedb/simpletodo#main' simpletodo-heroku

$ 

cd simpletodo-heroku

$ 

git init --initial-branch main

$ 

heroku apps:create --buildpack heroku/nodejs

$ 

edgedb project init --non-interactive

If you are using the JS query builder for EdgeDB then you will need to check the dbschema/edgeql-js directory in to your git repo after running yarn edgeql-js. The edgeql-js command cannot be run during the build step on Heroku because it needs access to a running EdgeDB instance which is not available at build time on Heroku.

$ 

yarn install && npx @edgedb/generate edgeql-js

The dbschema/edgeql-js directory was added to the .gitignore in the upstream project so we’ll remove it here.

$ 

sed -i '/^dbschema\/edgeql-js$/d' .gitignore

Create a PostgreSQL Add-on​

Heroku’s smallest PostgreSQL plan, Hobby Dev, limits the number of rows to 10,000, but EdgeDB’s standard library uses more than 20,000 rows so we need to use a different plan. We’ll use the Standard 0 plan for this guide.

$ 

heroku addons:create --wait heroku-postgresql:standard-0

Add the EdgeDB Buildpack​

To run EdgeDB on Heroku we’ll add the EdgeDB buildpack.

$ 
  
  

heroku buildpacks:add \
  --index 1 \
  https://github.com/edgedb/heroku-buildpack-edgedb.git

Use start-edgedb in the Procfile​

To make EdgeDB available to a process prepend the command with start-edgedb which is provided by the EdgeDB buildpack. For the sample application in this guide, the web process is started with the command npm start. If you have other processes in your application besides/instead of web that need to access EdgeDB those process commands should be prepended with start-edgedb too.

$ 

echo "web: start-edgedb npm start" > Procfile

Deploy the App​

Commit the changes and push to Heroku to deploy the app.

$ 

git add .

$ 

git commit -m "first commit"

$ 

git push heroku main

Scale the web dyno​

The default dyno size has 512MB of memory which is a little under powered to run EdgeDB. Scale the dyno so that it has 1GB of memory available.

$ 

heroku ps:type web=standard-2x

Health Checks​

Using an HTTP client, you can perform health checks to monitor the status of your EdgeDB instance. Learn how to use them with our health checks guide.