Deployment

At this point in our series you should have a fully functioning and tested address book running on your local machine. That is great and all but naturally we are going to want to be able to access our web application from anywhere on the web. Lucky for us deployment can actually be very easy. Today we are going to cover one solution for hosting a Clojure web application, deploying to Heroku.

Heroku

Register an Account

First, if you do not have one already, you will need to register for a Heroku account. Although all of the services we are going to utilize in this post are free, you will need to have a credit card on file with Heroku in order to install add-ons. Be sure to do this while you are registering.

Installing the Toolbelt

The Heroku toolbelt is a CLI tool for managing Heroku apps. Follow the link and install the proper version for your OS. Once you have the toolbelt installed, issue the following command in your terminal:

heroku login

You will be prompted for the email address and password you used when creating your Heroku account.

Creating the Heroku Application

With the toolbelt installed and authentication credentials provided we are now ready to create the Heroku app. Create your new application with the following command:

heroku create your-name-address-book

We now have a empty Heroku application waiting for us to deploy.

Adding Postrges

Before we deploy we are going to want to include the postgress add-on in our project. Issue the following command:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

The command created a hobby-dev level postrgess database that we will have access to from our application. The hobby-dev level is free to use and allows us to store up to 10,000 rows in our database, which should be plenty to support our single table.

Preparing our Application for Deployment

Before we can deploy our application we need to make just a few modifications. First, let’s add a production profile. Update project.clj so the profiles match the following:

:profiles { :test-local { :dependencies [[ midje "1.6.3" ] [ javax.servlet/servlet-api "2.5" ] [ ring-mock "0.1.5" ]] :plugins [[ lein-midje "3.1.3" ]]} ;; Set these in ./profiles.clj :test-env-vars {} :dev-env-vars {} :test [ :test-local :test-env-vars ] :dev [ :dev-env-vars ] :production { :ring { :open-browser? false :stacktraces? false :auto-reload? false }}}

All that we have added here are some configurations to disable a few ring features that don’t make sense in production.

Next, create a file named Procfile in the root of the project and populate it with the following:

web: lein with-profile production trampoline ring server

The Procfile is Heroku’s mechanism for declaring what commands are run by your application when it starts. The web: declaration is all we will need to start our application server.

What About Our Database

Looking back to Part 4 of this series we used the environ library to manage our connection to the database for test and dev environments by providing a :database-url in profiles.clj . When the command in the Procfile is run which uses with-profile production , our application will start with the production profile. The environ library will not find a value for :database-url in profiles.clj so it will next look for an environment variable of database-url . This environment variable will be found since one is conveniently generated for us when we install the postgress add-on.

Deploying to Heroku

We are now ready to deploy our application. You can do so by issuing the following command:

git push heroku master

When Heroku is finished taking care of business you can check and make sure everything went well:

heroku ps

You should see something along the lines of:

=== web (1X): `lein with-profile production trampoline ring server` web.1: up 2015/01/17 10:06:12 (~ 5m ago)

Take note of the status of web.1 as long as it says up we are good to go.

Wrap Up

Now that our web server is up you can visit https://your-name-address-book.herokuapp.com and use your application in production.

We have successfully arrived at the end of our address book example. You can find the code for the project on github at Compojure Address Book.