How to deploy Hasura GraphQL engine to Heroku

Introduction

Hasura gives you a GraphQL Application Programming Interface (API) that you can point to your data sources and Heroku provides you a platform that you can host such data sources.

In this article, you'll learn how to deploy a Hasura GraphQL engine on Heroku, and how to secure it from unauthorized access.

First steps

Sign up for an account on Heroku, if you already have an account, you should log in.

Once you are logged in, open another tab and navigate to Deploy Hasura with a new Postgres DB on Hasura docs, scroll down until you locate a button which reads "Deploy on Heroku".

Click on it, this should redirect you to Heroku with an Hasura engine ready to be deployed and it'll point to a Postgres database hosted on Heroku

Fill in your desired details, and click on Deploy app.

It'll take some minutes, and you'll notice the build log.

if all goes well, you should have a screen similar to the image below.

Click on View, this will redirect you to a web page console on Hasura, where you can interact with your database hosted on Heroku.

Now, you can perform your desired operation on the database and you also get a nice GraphiQL interface that allows you to interact with your data.

But, you are not done.

Copy the URL of your app and open it in another browser, you'll have access to the Hasura engine without authentication.

Leave this browser tab open, and let's fix this.

How To Secure Hasura GraphQL Endpoint

Navigate back to the browser that you used to deploy Hasura (in my case it's Firefox), and click on Manage App.

Locate the Settings tab, scroll down and locate Config Vars and click on Reveal Config Vars

Now, you'll need to add a new KEY and VALUE. This key should be named HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET and Its value will be the password that you'll use to log in to your Hasura instance.

Click on Add.

Now, navigate to the other browser where you initially logged in without authentication, try navigating to another page, or refresh the page.

You'll be greeted with a login screen.

Enter the value of the HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET that you saved on Heroku, if it's correct you should have access.

You'll also notice there is a new key under Request Headers called x-hasura-admin-secret.

Conclusion

This article explained how to deploy an Hasura instance on Heroku and how to secure it using an admin secret that will prevent unauthorized access.