Live Demo

These instructions will show you how to create an Express (a Node.js web application framework) 'Hello World' website from scratch, then deploy it on the Heroku server.

• Node.js - https://www.nodejs.org
• git - https://git-scm.com
• Free Heroku Account - https://www.heroku.com

I use the name i-express, you can call it anything you want, except express. It cannot be the same name as the Express package.

mkdir i-express
cd i-express

npm init

You will be asked a few questions after invoking npm init, the defaults can be used without any problem.

This will create a package.json file. You can treat this as a text file and modify the content if necessary.

npm install express --save

Create a file called server.js

server.js:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.get('/', (request, response) => {
  response.send('<h1>Hello World</h1>');
});

var port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
app.listen(port);

console.log('server started ' + port);

node server

You should be able to bring up a Hello World page by visiting http://localhost:3000.

After successfully testing the site, you can stop the server by pressing CTRL+C.

1. Sign in to https://heroku.com
2. Select New > Create new app to create a new app
3. Enter an App name (e.g. in my case i-express)
4. Install the Heroku CLI

npm install -g heroku-cli

5. Login to Heroku

heroku login

Note: If the heroku command is throwing an error (e.g. incompatible Node version), other methods of installing Heroku CLI can be found here.

Create a .gitignore file to prevent files in node_modules from being tracked and uploaded to Heroku.

.gitignore:

node_modules/

Initialize git and deploy to Heroku

git init
heroku git:remote -a i-express
git add .
git commit -am "Create Hello World page"
git push heroku master

Voilà! Your new site is now live at https://<AppName>.herokuapp.com

• Ivan Lim - Initial work - Active Improvement Web Studio

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details