I recently moved all of my self-hosted Wordpress websites to Heroku and I'm now spending $0 a month, happily saving over $300 a year in hosting and...
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Thank you for this awesome post! I am kind of newbie in heroku and git. I am facing some problems. After adding a plugin/theme, i can't see it in my dashboard plugin/theme page. I did git add, commit and push. Still couldn't able to see any change on dashboard. I also can't login to dashboard with custom domain. Probably cloudflare flexible ssl plugin will solve the problem. But for that I need to be able to add a plugin which I am unable. Any help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Hey Monir, are you adding inside the app folder? And git add/commit/pushed it up to heroku? It should appear in your dashboard once you've done so... Yes the cloudflare flexible plugin will solve it. Once you become more comfortable, you can modify the config/application.php file and remove any instances of "http" ... Think of application.php as your wp-config.php file
Thank you for your reply. Yes, I did add inside pulled repo containing app name/web/app/plugins or /web/app/themes folder. And then add/commit/push it up to heroku using the command "git push heroku master". Meanwhile wordpress update with composer(I have updated to the latest version 5.4.2) and then pushing worked like a charm. But the plugins & themes don't appear in the respective section. I did try once again overriding the folder of themes and plugins to check but it shows "nothing to change/working directory clean (i dont remember exactly, but type of this text showed up). I also faced trouble because the git add,commit,push command was not working from that sub-folder but trying from the main branch showed nothing to change text on my windows(I am really a newbie in git console using and commands).
It's ok, you're getting very close to getting everything up and going. Do you use VSCode? Try dragging or opening your heroku app folder into VSCode and tracking git changes from there.. Also, is there a chance your adding the folder to the "wordpress-heroku" folder? because that's not the folder we are linked to in Heroku. My apologies if that's not the case.. This issue just seems to be git related, so I'm trying to figure out which folder you're pushing up
I also think I may have messed up something with git related. And I am adding folders on my given app name folder which was created by pulling my heroku app git url, not the "wordpress-heroku" folder. BTW, I didn't work with vscode. Let me try, although dont know how to manage it. Also trying to learn to get with git commands. Thank you for your replies. I am very close yet so far :(
Cool just wanted to make sure that you cloned down the git url from heroku, so thats good that you did that. I recommend using Vscode (visual code studio) for many reasons. One of the reasons is that it helps me visualize git a lot better. Whenever I'm coding, I can see which files to need to be pushed up. It also has a terminal of its own :)
By the way, did you type “heroku login” in your terminal to link your computer with your heroku account? I left that line out of the guide.
Thank you for your super effort. I will try vscode. One last thing to ask you, whenever I add a plugin in plugin folder then how should I connect it with main branch to use git push. Trying from the folder shows that there is no branch. And trying from the main branch shows nothing is changed. Thank you again.
Edit: I used heroku login earlier while uploading fresh wordpress. I was redirected to a browser and after successful login it returned back to the git bash terminal. After that, I didn't use login everytime as i suppose the connection isn't changed. And I could able to update wordpress also without any login.
Right on, you just need to run heroku login once so you're good. just wanted to make sure. It should already be connected to the main branch. Are you doing "CD" to go to the root folder of your app, then doing git add && git commit -m "anything" && git push ?
PS. I'm only using the master branch, never created any other branches since It's just me working on it.
Solved the problem! Probably a .gitignore file causing me to interrupt the uploading of the plugins. Thank you!
Awesome, looking forward to your success with your new wordpress site
Hi Aryaziai,
Thanks a lot for this great guide!
On updating WP version, I followed your steps. When doing composer update, I got the following responses:
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.
Problem 1
- Root composer.json requires wpackagist-plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack 2.4.4, it is satisfiable by wpackagist-plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack[2.4.4] from lock repo but wpackagist-plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack[dev-trunk, 3.7.1, 4.0.9, 4.0.10, 4.0.11, 4.0.12] from composer repo (wpackagist.org) has higher repository priority. The packages with higher priority do not match your constraint and are therefore not installable. See getcomposer.org/repoprio for details and assistance.
Problem 2
- Root composer.json requires composer/installers 1.5.0 -> satisfiable by composer/installers[v1.5.0].
- composer/installers v1.5.0 requires composer-plugin-api ^1.0 -> found composer-plugin-api[2.0.0] but it does not match the constraint.
Problem 3
- Root composer.json requires koodimonni/composer-dropin-installer 1.1.0 -> satisfiable by koodimonni/composer-dropin-installer[1.1.0].
- koodimonni/composer-dropin-installer 1.1.0 requires composer-plugin-api ^1.0 -> found composer-plugin-api[2.0.0] but it does not match the constraint.
Problem 4
- composer/installers v1.5.0 requires composer-plugin-api ^1.0 -> found composer-plugin-api[2.0.0] but it does not match the constraint.
- wpackagist-plugin/debug-bar 0.9 requires composer/installers ~1.0 -> satisfiable by composer/installers[v1.5.0].
- Root composer.json requires wpackagist-plugin/debug-bar 0.9 -> satisfiable by wpackagist-plugin/debug-bar[0.9].
Do I miss anything from your guides? What should I do to fix these?
Thanks in advance and look forward to hearing from you.
Just in case somebody had this same issue, it is because you are using a composer version not supported on the WP package, just downgrade your composer to version 1.10.x and run composer install and it should work
This is somewhat the same challenge that I am facing.
I will really appreciate any help from anyone.
Thanks.
I would change
"composer/installers": "1.5.0",to"composer/installers": "~1.0",.This will solve many, but not all, of the conflicts. The others you will have to suss out. (I am having trouble with them myself.)
Hey Pacharapol, thank you for reaching out!
1) The Heroku free plan allows up to 1,000 free dyno hours (upon CC activation) which is more than enough. The main limitation is that the site goes to sleep after 30 minutes, which can easily be avoided if you ping your site before it goes to sleep. There are lot's of services that can help accomplish this. There are zero database costs, we are using the "Kitefin Shared" plan: elements.heroku.com/addons/jawsdb-....
2) Let's Encrypt is awesome. We're using Cloudflare for free SSL, plus many other benefits (i.e. minifying code, security.. )
There are zero costs involved with this guide. I'd say overall the biggest limitation is the 5MB max db size, which is more than enough for most basic Wordpress sites.
I've had a problem with Heroku when need a custom domain. SSL is immediately removed, unless paid dyno (hobby 7 USD/mo fixed). That's why I moved to Docker and Google Cloud Run, which automatically provision SSL. It's Pay As You Go and very cheap.
The only time I have to touch Let's Encrypt is on Digital Ocean. Luckily, there is Nginx-le Docker image with auto renew.
Thats so odd. Have you tried following Steps 5-7? I simply update the nameservers at GoDaddy to point to Cloudflare. I then click custom domain in my heroku app's setting (insert my url without www or https), and grab the dns target. Then I go over to Cloudflare and and add the two CNAME rows with the DNS target.
Anyways Heroku freeTier dyno will shut down after an idle. So not sure if I will use it for something serious.
Just set up a cron job that pings your site every 30 minutes medium.com/better-programming/keep...
Now, I made it with free everything.
SSL for custom domain on free-tier Heroku can be done with proper Cloudflare settings
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt ・ Jun 16 ・ 1 min read
I think I currently don't need to keep it awake, or cron job; but I will consider it.
BTW, for your WordPress, it seems to be possible to build pages in advance, to static page; and host it on Netlify, where it is always awake anyway.
The search bar inside WordPress would probably be dead, without Heroku or some kind of serverless function, though.
Awesome! Glad to hear this. Will it work with a dynamic site as well? I've been using cron-job.org (for free) and haven't had any issues
Adding and removing themes and plugins. The plugin and theme folders are ignored in the .gitignore file. So I'm guessing these need to be removed from the .gitignore file. Or should we be adding the plugins and theme to the composer.json file and let composer do the loading?
Hi Steve, are you adding your plugins into web/app/plugins , and your theme(s) into web/app/themes? Ignore the wp-content folder that is inside the root directory.
Yep. But these folders are in the .gitignore and the composer.json file seems to imply that the themes and plugins should be added there.
Hi Steve, I’ve never run into this issue. But nevertheless, comment it out from your gitignore file. Let me know if things are working smoothly.
Hi!
For what it is worth, I am having the same issue. I have added a theme using
composer require wpackagist-theme/my-themeon the cli, then it didn't work so I followed the directions above and copied the unzipped theme folder directly into/web/app/themes, commented out the.gitignoreline that was preventing the themes from going into source control, and pushed to heroku. The build succeeded. The theme did not show up.(the name of the theme is
author)I ran into this issue as well and figured it out. The reason this is happening is due to WordPress 5.6+ not being able to generate the additional image sizes upon upload. Some code in the WP Offload Media Lite plugin (
wpackagist-plugin/amazon-s3-and-cloudfront) is preventing it from uploading the images to S3 entirely if those additional sizes weren't previously generated.As for why WP 5.6+ isn't generating those images, it seems the
GDPHP extension is required for those operations. For some reason, it's not included by default when you deploy with the latest version of WordPress.Thankfully, Heroku allows you to install
GDas well as some other extensions by simply adding them to yourcomposer.json. So if you want to have the latest version of WordPress installed with the plugin working, just add this to yourcomposer.json:and
composer update.Very impressive. thanks for sharing!
I am sorry may be you could comment about "Clone the Heroku git URL onto your computer" - simply can not understand - I know what clone a repo to your computer - that i can imagine but URL - where exactly and what excatly "clone" means here, thank you
also "clone wordpress-heroku" on your computer link leads to some discussion
Thanks @aryaziai for this amazing article. Deeply appreciated!
I just struggled for login to the "wp-admin" portal as I populated the field HEROKU_APP_NAME with some name and I wasn't able to retrieve any login credentails for wp-admin. I googled and found that HEROKU_APP_NAME field should be empty while deploying, otherwise you will not be able to login to the wp-admin.
To read more, here is the thing:
github.com/PhilippHeuer/wordpress-...
It would be great if you can also add this point on to your blog because someone like me might find it helpful. Anyways, Thanks :)
Thanks a lot for this great help!
I tried it but it doesn't seem to be usable with S3.
Indeed, when I try to upload a picture, even small, it crashes saying it ran out of memory. Even when I change the memory limit to 512 MB, Heroku free plan's maximum, it still crashes when uploading the file.
I have to admit that I upgraded Heroku to 5.8, just because composer 1 is reaching end of life. I also upgraded other plugins but did not add any.
Did anybody run into the same problem? Did anybody find a solution?
Is it normal that Wordpress require more than 500 MB of memory?
Never mind, it seems gone now. Probably a bug by the AWS library
Interested in doing this, but 5Mb doesn't seem enough.
My WordPress site is 12,000+ posts.
My MySQL is 89Mb.
Files supposedly 3Gb.
Last night, I deployed my first thing to do Heroku, free. It's Nocodb, the open-source Airtable alternative. I have used it to browse my WP MySQL database. Nocodb seems to deploy as postgresql. The Heroku dashboard says it's using 11.5Mb. I guess it's different for MySQL?
Next one up for ClearDB on Heroku is $9.99pm.
This post (itecnote.com/tecnote/heroku-how-mu...) says "You can go over it by quite a lot (by 5-10x) before Heroku will get unhappy with you."
Is this right?
I tried my way, but it seems to only run in Heroku, not local. I cannot run locally at all.
Which is probably as same as this isse.
Description of your issue
I guessed that the DB setting is set by CUSTOM_DB_URL of the .env file and set it up.
However, when I opened the top page, DB error occurred frequently such as no wp_post.
CUSTOM_DB_URL seemed to be not working effectively. So, do I need to add DB settings to web / wp / wp-config.php?
Also, config / environments / development.php Is it possible to switch the DB settings of each environment by describing the DB definition?
If possible, where do you decide the current declaration of (environment / production / staging / development)?
Steps to Reproduce
github.com/PhilippHeuer/wordpress-...
Other Information
Git Commit/Version: current master
I'm having issues updating to a newer version of WordPress. I opened the Composer.json file and changed the version number to "johnpbloch/wordpress": "5.8.1". Then, I updated composer (as per the instructions) and pushed my changes, but this only updates the version of composer, not the version of WordPress. I think I misunderstood the instructions somewhere. What am I missing? Thanks!
Thank you for the fabulous tutorial! I've got a couple of questions though -the option to install plugins for example. is not enabled in the wp-admin-page (accessing through Heroku) That change I'd have to make them in my local files and push the updates to Heroku, is that the correct approach? If so, is there a way to run the wp instance locally in order to facilitate the modifications? Regards ;)
Hey Felipe, yes we need to add the plugin folder locally and then push up.. I never got around to running WP locally but I believe there are solutions.
Hi, thanks for the informative guide post.
I was able to deploy my wordpress site to heroku. Nonetheless, I have some few challenges.
First, adding
{
"require": {
"ext-gd": "*",
}
}
in my composer.json seems not to be working.
An attempt to run composer update brings up errors.
I attached a screenshot of my terminal for details of the errors.
Secondly, it seems setting up cloudflare with Amazon S3 Offload Media Lite plugin requires creating a sub-domain first, and then creating a CNAME record that matches the bucket name and sub-domain as explained in docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/lates...
However, is it possible to create a sub-domain with the Heroku wordpress hosting?
I'll gladly provide clarifications where necessary and will appreciate any help possible.
Many thanks to everyone.
Screenshot 2
Hello @aryaziai, This is an awesome article. However, I ran into an issue when I change the Permalink to
POST NAMEin WordPress Permalink settings.It's giving me 404 on all my post pages.
Very inspiring. If you have article about Heroku build and deploy site with static generator such Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby, Eleventy, please let me know.
I used Nuxt Universal (i.e. not SSG mode) with MongoDB Atlas, and is quite happy with it. This might also prevent rebuilding SSG for every new posts.
Hosted on Google App Engine for less than 1 USD/mo. The domain name is less than 10 USD/year.
Hi Bayu, I appreciate the comment. I'm sorry I haven't gotten there yet.
Hey thanks for the article! Having a little bit of trouble... Trying to use the All-in-one-wordpress migration plug-in, which is failing when trying to upload a 130mb backup. I think it's due to max_execution_time being too low. But I can't work out how to update this when using the wordpress-heroku repo. Any chance you could help me out?,
Cheers!
Hey Shayne, I don't think that will work given the restrictions on this setup. I imported my previous sites here by exporting the relevant database tables (i.e. wp_users) and and importing them into my new database by using MySQL Workbench. I've included in the tutorial how to obtain your database credentials.. Maybe someone has figured out a workaround but dealing directly with the database is always my preferred way.
Hi, how do i run it on my local machine?
I got 500 error after deploy !
I receive en error: Error establishing a database connection But at documentation said that data will be established automatically.
Hi, i have an issue. anytime i activate a plugin or new theme. my website crashes and i get the notice as shown in the attached picture. please how do i fix this
Hey @aryaziai
What if I'm starting a brand new wordpress site (no host or domain yet) to be deployed on heroku? Would I still need Cloudflare?
I don't think cloudflare is necessary. I was using it just for "https"
I am getting error when accessing admin page. After adding mentioned plugin in the folder, error persists.