So you've got a cool app on your computer but now you'd like to share it with the world. Follow these steps to take our Lemonade Stand App to the cloud...

In addition to the prerequisites you've already set up for the local app...

1. Sign up for a free Heroku Account
2. Install the Heroku Toolbelt
3. Windows ONLY: Install GitHub for Windows
   We won't actually be using the GitHub service, but their Windows client (specifically, their Git Shell) solves a lot of the ugly SSH issues in Windows.

1. Open a command prompt

   Mac: Run the Terminal app

   Windows: Double-click the Git Shell icon on your desktop
   NOTE: This is a different command prompt than what we used when we built the local app.

2. Make sure you're back in your project's directory

   Mac

   cd ~/Desktop/lemonade-app
   

   Windows

   cd %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\lemonade-app
   

3. Create empty code files necessary for deployment to Heroku

   Mac

   touch Procfile
   touch .gitignore
   

   Windows

   echo $null > Procfile
   echo $null > .gitignore
   

4. Open each of the above files in Sublime Text 2 and copy/paste their associated content from the following sources

   Procfile

   .gitignore

   IMPORTANT: Be sure to save the changes to the files (File > Save)

5. Tell Git who you are

   NOTE: You don't need to this if you've already got Git set up with your name and email

   git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
   git config --global user.name "Your Name"
   

6. Initialize a local Git repository

   git init
   

7. Perform your first Git commit

   git add .
   git commit -m "My first commit"
   

8. Log into Heroku

   heroku login
   

   Enter the credentials you set up in the Prerequisites.

   Mac: If Heroku reports that you don't have an existing public key and asks if you'd like to create one, answer yes!

9. Windows ONLY

   You need to manually add your SSH public key to Heroku

   heroku keys:add
   

   If you're prompted that an existing public key can't be found and you're asked if you'd like to create one, say yes!

   The final output should look something like this

   Uploading SSH public key C:/Users/your_username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub... done
   

10. Create your Heroku app

    heroku create
    

    You'll see output that looks something like this

    Creating warm-sierra-1964... done, stack is cedar
    http://warm-sierra-1964.herokuapp.com/ | [email protected]:warm-sierra-1964.git
    Git remote heroku added
    

    If that was the output of your app, your app's URL would be:

    http://warm-sierra-1964.herokuapp.com/

11. Deploy your app

    git push heroku master
    

    If you get a warning that the authenticity of the host heroku.com can't be established and if you'd like to to continue connecting, thereby trusting the Heroku RSA fingerprint, choose yes!

    You'll see a bunch of output, but if everything was successful, the end will look something like this:

    ...
    http://warm-sierra-1964.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku
    To [email protected]:warm-sierra-1964.git
     * [new branch]      master -> master
    

12. Show it to the world!

    Open up your app's URL in your browser. Then share it with all your friends!

13. Make it your own

    Tinker with the code. Then deploy your changes:

    git add .
    git commit -m "a description of your change"
    git push heroku master
    

• In a few simple steps, you pushed your app to Heroku, a PaaS provider that allows people to host their apps and API's in the cloud. We essetially followed their Getting Started guide to deploy our Lemonade Stand app.

• Heroku uses Git to deploy your app. We created a local git repository, committed our code, and pushed it to a remote repository set up by Heroku when they provisioned our app. To deploy updates, all we have to do is commit those changes to our local repository and push again.

• Heroku gives you a generated URL under their *.herokuapp.com domain. If you want to associate your app with a custom domain, you can learn more about that here.

• Wanna see a live version of the Lemonade Stand App? Check out:

  http://lemonade.targetrad.com