Problems with public directory when deploying Node.js app with Heroku

Question

I've been working on an app which will feature a Timelinejs (open source js library) element on the client side. I copied the Timelinejs library into my public/javascripts/ directory of my app. Then I linked it in my html header. When I serve my app up locally everything works fine with the timeline. However, I noticed that when I deployed my app to Heroku it wasn't loading my timeline. Using chrome js console I discovered that it didn't find my files in the public/Javascripts/Timelinejs folder. Using the Heroku run bash command I discovered that none of my Timelinejs files were present in the file structure, although an empty Timelinejs directory was present. Is there any command or configuration I need to specify to get these files to my Heroku deployment?

Answer 1

Heroku has a readonly file system. The directory where you can write are ./tmp or ./log. You can't write inside the public folder. That's because of how they manage their dynos and the way to scale them. If you want to store something, use the ./tmp or, recommended, a s3 bucket. (as I presume 'tmp' stands for 'temporary' :D)

More info here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/read-only-filesystem