Deploy PHP to Heroku

Introduction

Having your code on your local machine is one thing and deploying it on a server and sharing it with the world is another thing.

Today we will deploy our PHP program on Heroku.

According to wikipedia:

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service supporting several programming languages. Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go.

Requirements

Now let’s get started

Heroku Account and Cli

I assume you have a free account on heroku. If you don’t go and create a new account. It’s free and it takes less than 5 minutes.

Then install heroku cli

Composer

If you don’t have composer it’s a good time to install it as well. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. We are not going to use it today and I’ll talk about it in detail later.

Files

At the moment I have a index.php file and inside it I say hello world.

<?php
echo "Hello World!";

Now create a file and name it composer.json and inside it write an empty json like this

{

}

Great. Now you have everything you need.

Git

Our project needs to be a git repository. So let’s initialize it by running

git init

Then add everything and commit

git add .
git commit -m “initialized the project”

Great!

Deploy

First login to heroku by running

heroku login

This command opens your web browser to the Heroku login page. If your browser is already logged in to Heroku, simply click the Login button displayed on the page.

Now run

heroku create <name-of-your-application>

If you don’t specify a name, heroku will generate a random name. Their names are so random and ugly and I always forgot which application was what. So I prefer to specify the application name myself

heroku create deploy-php-to-heroku

Then all you have to do is

git push heroku main

Sometimes the name of your main branch is master in that case run

git push heroku master

If everything goes successfully it will give a url which you can visit

You can copy the url or run heroku open to visit your page.

Now you can share that url with anyone and they can visit your website

Mine is:

https://deploy-php-to-heroku.herokuapp.com/

Conclusion

Now you know about deploying a PHP code to heroku.

I recommend you to open a PHP files and echo something simple. then try to deploy it to heroku.

If you have any suggestions, questions, or opinions, please contact me. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Key takeaways

• how to deploy PHP to heroku
• prepare a PHP website to deploy to heroku