将服务器部署到 heroku 开发和生产

Question

I have a Heroku app ready and working, it is connected to my github repo, and I have a Procfile on my Node.js (NestJS to be precise) server project. At the moment what happens is every time I make a push to my repo project the heroku deploys the server with:

web npm run start:prod

My goal as part of the CI/CD proccess is to create 2 servers that are deployed:

1. When a push to development branch is made - and in that case run a development server version
2. When a push to master branch is made and in that case deploy the production server (2 different servers).

My question is what is the way to achieve this?

I guess I should create another Heroku app and connect it to the development branch of my repo, but how do I make sure that here I run a development version? Should i hold 2 different Procfile s on those branches? Do i actually have to create another Heroku app or is there a better approach to this?

Answer 1

Ideally you should never deploy development version of your app to a public environment, because among other things it may expose flaws in your security that can be later exploited on your production servers.

What you probably are talking about is what we refer to as staging environment. It is an environment configured exactly like production , but where we test code before we deploy it onto production .

In terms of Heroku - yes you would in fact need two Heroku apps - one for production and one for staging .

Note that the staging environment should be running with NODE_ENV=production .

In terms of CI/CD, I have configured my CD to deploy to a different Heroku app based on which branch pushes are made to. development goes to our staging app and master goes to our production app. (Although for simplicity I renamed the branches to staging and production :D).

I cannot give you a ready-made script for GitHub Actions, as I'm using GitLab and although CI/CD is very similar there, there are subtle differences, but GutHub Actions should have if conditions that work similar to:

if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'
 - dpl --provider=heroku --strategy=api --app=$HEROKU_PROD_APP_NAME --api-key=$HEROKU_PROD_API_KEY

Furthermore, you shouldn't need two Procfile s because the environments should be configured identically if you want to be sure that your code will behave the same on production.