Running PHP application on Heroku (Mac OS X)

Heroku is a very popular PaaS (Platform as a Service) cloud hosting service which allows you to deploy various applications, especially Ruby on Rails application. Heroku doesn't charge anything to sign up and has a free service upto 5 MB usage of PostgreSQL database, that's enough to used for your development environment. Heroku is majorly to Deploy Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Java, Clojure and Django apps, but you can also run any type of app (like PHP).

The PHP support was launched in partnership with Facebook, to attract Facebook application  developers to Heroku's cloud platform (Heroku support PHP). In this post, you will learn how to deploy PHP project on Heroku. I assume that you already signed up with Heroku and configured your SSH keys with Heroku servers. If you haven't done it already, follow these instructions.

You can try it out for yourself by just creating a new project folder with an index.php file in it, then creating a Heroku project. When you push to Heroku, they'll automatically identify it as PHP and compile/install Apache and PHP into your slug.

$ mkdir PROJECT_NAME

$ cd PROJECT_NAME

$ git init

$ git add .

$ git commit -m "Initial commit"

Go to github.com and create a new repository

$ git remote add origin git@github.com:YOUR_USER_NAME/PROJECT_NAME.git

$ git push origin master

Installing the heroku command line client:

If you are using a Mac, install the following version of the heroku command line client (toolbelt). http://toolbelt.herokuapp.com/osx/download

Creating an application on heroku is easy, you just need to run the following command:

$ heroku create PROJECT_NAME --stack cedar

Heroku uses PostgreSQL as its default database but also support MySQL. You can use either Heroku's Postgres-based shared DB storage or a cloud-hosted MySQL like Amazon RDS, ClearDB MySQL Database or Xeround Cloud DB for your PHP apps on Heroku. (Amazon RDS is a service that allows you to set up, operate and scale a dedicated MySQL database server on top of EC2. You can use Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) addon on Heroku.)

$ heroku addons:add shared-database:5mb

Retrieve the database credentials by following command:

$ heroku config

Now, the fun part – push the modified code up to Heroku with git push heroku master:

$ git push heroku master

The output should look something like this:

If you get this error below, make sure the index.php file is under your project folder, and run the command: $ git add .

Setting up database:

I'm familiar with MySQL database, that why I'm choosing ClearDB MySQL database with FREE plan. Run the following command to install the addon:

$ heroku addons:add cleardb:ignite

$ heroku config

$ heroku config:add DATABASE_URL=mysql://db_user:password@db_server/db_schema

How do I import a MySQL dumpfile into the database?

$ mysql -u db_user -p -h db_server db_schema < db_dump_file.sql

Now you can login to mysql server from unix shell or GUI tool (like MySQL Workbench) to check your database.

Finally, you may want to change the database setting in the PHP project. (For this example, I have to configure my config.class.php file)

After that, run the following command:

$ git commit -am "Changed db setting to MySQL"

$ git push heroku master

Congratulations! you've just created your PHP application on Heroku. :)

Access your app from http://YOUR_PROJECT_NAME.herokuapp.com

or just run "$ heroku open"

You can use the "$ heroku logs" command to retrieve this log stream (in streaming mode if you add the –tail options).

Heroku Documentation:

Quickstart guide: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart

Dev Center: http://devcenter.heroku.com/

Have fun!