Setting up an app on Heroku

Once you have an app ready to go using baldrick, you can deploy it to any server you want. Here we provide instructions on setting it up on Heroku.

To start off, create a free account on Heroku if you don’t already have one. When you see the option to create a new app, select it (ignore the “add to pipeline” option). Give a name to your app; You need to select a name that is not already taken and it does not have to be the same as the bot’s name here.

You should now be on the “Deploy” section. Again, ignore the pipeline option. Select Github as “Deployment Method”. Enter the relevant GitHub organization or account that the bot resides in (this should be automatically populated if you have given Heroku access to your GitHub account) and type in the bot’s repository name (either this bot or a forked version of it).

If you want to enable automatic deployment from a selected branch of the repository, click the “Enable Automatic Deploys” button. This will pick up changes to the given branch and re-deploy the bot as needed. For most cases, you don’t need the “wait for CI to pass before deploy” option as the bot is already tested here.

For the first time, you also need to manually deploy the bot by clicking “Deploy Branch”.

Once it is successfully deployed, and once you have followed the instructions to add the app to GitHub (see Registering and installing a GitHub app) go to “Settings” tab of the app on Heroku and you can customize its behavior using “Config Vars”. This is the only custom configuration on Heroku and can be set through the Heroku admin interface, as mentioned. The main required environment variables (also see “Authentication” section below) are:

  • GITHUB_APP_INTEGRATION_ID, which should be set to the integration ID provided by GitHub app (see “GitHub settings” section below) under “General Settings”, specifically “About… ID”. This is a numerical integer value.

  • GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY, which is generated by the GitHub app (see “GitHub settings” section below). This private key should look like:

    ` -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- <some random characters> -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY----- `

    The whole key, including the BEGIN and END header and footer should be pasted into the field.