Heroku

Heroku is a very well known hosting for web applications. It has a free plan useful for testing purposes, and paid options to deploy the website.

It offers a wide variety of addons and it's one of the most flexible PAAS around.

They are PHP friendly, and they have a great "Getting Started with PHP on Heroku" guide at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-php#introduction, and it will be the base of the instruction set.

Let's see how to install Grav on Heroku.

First, sign up for Heroku.

Download the Heroku CLI, which is a command-line utility needed to deploy create and deploy your site.

Once installed, type

heroku login

Enter your credentials.

Now checkout the PHP "Getting Started" example they provide in your local web root, so you can test locally the site prior to deploying it.

git clone https://github.com/heroku/php-getting-started.git your-folder

cd your-folder

Now deploy your app with

heroku create

and

git push heroku master

Ensure that at least one instance of the app is running:

heroku ps:scale web=1

and open the site in the browser:

heroku open

You should now see the sample PHP project. Now that all is set, you're ready to go on and run Grav instead of the sample site.

First, delete the web/ folder in your current site folder.

Copy your Grav site files there, making sure you're also copying the .htaccess hidden file. Overwrite all the files that were existing.

Now open the Procfile file. This is a Heroku-specific file. Change the line to

web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 ./

You should make sure the site works locally, prior to uploading it to Heroku, just to ensure the are no errors.

Now commit to the repository with

git add . ; git commit -am 'Added Grav'

Then edit composer.json and add post deploy command to the scripts section as in

"scripts": {
  "compile": [
    "bin/grav install",
    "bin/gpm install quark -y"
  ]
}

and commit that to the repository with

git add . ; git commit -am 'Add post deploy bin/grav install'

Then run

git push heroku master

and the site should be good to go!

Due to the ephemeral nature of Heroku's filesystem, all needed plugins or themes must be added to composer.json just like above and kept there so they are installed every time the site is pushed to Heroku. For example, if you need the admin plugin and a theme, add them in composer like in

"scripts": {
  "compile": [
    "php bin/grav install",
    "php bin/gpm install admin -y",
    "php bin/gpm install awesome-theme-name-here -y"
  ]
}