Deploy json-server to {{ free hosting site }}

Instructions how to deploy the full fake REST API json-server to various free hosting sites. Should only be used in development purpose but can act as a simpler database for smaller applications.

• Create your database
• Deploy to Heroku

Create your database

1. Press the green Use this template-button in the right corner
2. Give your new repo a name and press the green Create repository from template-button
3. Clone your newly created repository to your computer

4 . Change the contents of db.json to your own content according to the json-server example and then commit your changes to git locally.

this example will create /posts route , each resource will have id, title and content. id will auto increment!

{
  "posts":[
    {
      "id" : 0,
      "title": "First post!",
      "content" : "My first content!"
    }
  ]
}

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Deploy to Heroku

Heroku is a free hosting service for hosting small projects. Easy setup and deploy from the command line via git.

Pros

• Easy setup
• Free

Cons

• App has to sleep a couple of hours every day.
• "Powers down" after 30 mins of inactivity. Starts back up when you visit the site but it takes a few extra seconds. Can maybe be solved with Kaffeine

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Install Heroku

1 . Create your database

2 . Create an account on
https://heroku.com

3 . Install the Heroku CLI on your computer:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli

4 . Connect the Heroku CLI to your account by writing the following command in your terminal and follow the instructions on the command line:

heroku login

5 . Then create a remote heroku project, kinda like creating a git repository on GitHub. This will create a project on Heroku with a random name. If you want to name your app you have to supply your own name like heroku create project-name:

heroku create my-cool-project

6 . Push your app to Heroku (you will see a wall of code)

git push heroku master

7 . Visit your newly create app by opening it via heroku:

heroku open

8 . For debugging if something went wrong:

heroku logs --tail

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How it works

Heroku will look for a startup-script, this is by default npm start so make sure you have that in your package.json (assuming your script is called server.js):

 "scripts": {
    "start" : "node server.js"
 }

You also have to make changes to the port, you can't hardcode a dev-port. But you can reference herokus port. So the code will have the following:

const port = process.env.PORT || 4000;