How to Deploy a Basic Static HTML Website to Heroku?

Heroku is a simple and one-stop solution to host any website or server. This article revolves around how you can host your own Static HTML webpage on Heroku. To demonstrate this we are going to build a simple webpage and host it.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Heroku Account
• Heroku CLI

Let's create a directory named "portfolio" for our project. We will connect this directory to our Heroku app so that whenever we update the local HTML file, changes reflect on the hosted website.

Step 1:

Create a directory with the name "portfolio" and change the working directory to it.

$ mkdir portfolio
$ cd portfolio

Step 2:

Create your own static HTML website and name it “home.html” (We are going to create a simple file with just "My portfolio" as text)

$ echo "<h1> My Portfolio </h1>" > home.html 

Step 3:

Heroku by default does not allow you to deploy an application that does not have a backend. So we need to create a dummy backend or dynamic PHP file. We need to use a trick and tell Heroku that our website is a PHP application. To do this simply copy and paste the following commands in your terminal. composer.json has been included to provide support for PHP application on Heroku. If an app has no composer dependencies, we must include empty composer.json  to recognize the PHP application.

$ echo '<?php include_once("home.html"); ?>' > index.php
$ echo '{}' > composer.json

Step 4:

Initialize the repository as a git repository.

$ git init

Step 5:

Create your Heroku app using the new button on the top right side of Heroku dashboard. We are going to name this app as "your-app-name-123"

Step 6:

Login to your Heroku account using the Heroku CLI

$ heroku login

Step 7:

Now that we have created our app, we just need to connect the local git repository to the Heroku app. To do this we add the remote of the Heroku app to the git repository. (Don't forget to replace "your-app-name-123" with your own app name)

$ heroku git:remote -a your-app-name-123

Step 8:

Push the changes to your Heroku app.

$ git push heroku master

Step 9:

Your app is now live on Heroku. To view your app, click on the link that appears at the end of the previous step, which looks like https://your-app-name-123.herokuapp.com/ . To commit and save all the changes to your home.html file, execute the following commands from your “portfolio" directory.

$ git add . 
$ git commit -m "your commit message" 
$ git push heroku master