Heroku - 5 Overview Heroku

This lesson walks through creating a Heroku account, your first application, and gives a brief tour of every tab of the Heroku dashboard. The deeper details for each section come in later videos. On heroku.com you click Sign up, fill the form, then activate the account via the email link Heroku sends you. After logging in, the welcome screen offers two main choices: create a new app, or create a new team. We focus on creating an application first: pick a name (here we), choose a region, and click Create app.

Dashboard tour

You land on the application's dashboard, with several tabs in the top menu. Clicking Open app opens the live URL; for a fresh app, Heroku shows a default welcome page and a link to the docs. Now the tabs, one by one:

• Overview — high-level view of installed add-ons, the Dyno formation (number and size of dynos, which are Linux machines running in the cloud), collaborators activity (who contributed to the app and when), and the latest events such as the initial release or log plex.
• Resources — configure dynos (size, scale up/down) and add-ons. To edit dynos you must first select the application language. Clicking on the add-ons section opens the marketplace, a huge catalog of add-ons (databases, caches like Redis, monitoring, etc.). Each add-on has its own page with description, features and pricing.
• Deploy — manage everything related to the code that the app runs. The Pipeline at the top lets you tie several apps sharing the same codebase together (typically a test environment alongside the main app). Below, the deployment method picker lets you choose between Heroku Git, GitHub and Docker, with example commands for the chosen option.
• Metrics — empty at first, gradually populates with information like dyno load, memory consumption, throughput and more. Very useful to answer "is my app healthy?" questions.
• Activity — logs every event in the app's life. For a brand new app you only see the initial release and the log plex entry.
• Access — invite people to collaborate. In the free version, anyone you invite gets nearly absolute control over the app. For more granular control, create a team using the team menu, where you can choose exactly what each member can do.
• Settings — rename the application (which also changes its URL — names must be unique across Heroku), define config vars (already discussed), see the buildpack that compiles your app, configure an SSL certificate, add a custom domain, transfer ownership to another team member, or toggle Maintenance mode, which displays a standard maintenance message to your users while you work on the app (you can customize that page).

At the very bottom of the Settings tab is the button to delete the application. That covers the whole dashboard tour. The next lesson will go into permissions and pricing in detail. See you in the next video.