How to deploy to Heroku directly from my Gitlab repository

Question

In my team, we use Gitlab as a remote repository, so we are looking for a solution to auto deploy our apps to Heroku. We found Codeship for auto deploying apps to Heroku from Github.

Any tips? Tricks?

Solution 1

If you are not prepared to use Ruby/dpl you can deploy to Heroku as follows:

Look up your Heroku API key (Account settings -> API Key on the Heroku web console) and make it available as a Gitlab secret variable e.g. HEROKU_API_KEY (Please note the values is not the same as what heroku auth:token returns...)

Then add two script lines in your .gitlab-ci.yml config file at the relevant job:

git remote add heroku https://heroku:[email protected]/<name of your heroku app>.git

git push -f heroku HEAD:master

You can see detailed explanation at http://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/permalink/deploying-jekyll-to-heroku-using-gitlab-ci

Solution 2

Here is the solution I found , restating in case the link is broken:

Configure project

This is what the .gitlab-ci.yml file looks like for this project:

test:
  script:
  # this configures Django application to use attached postgres database that is run on `postgres` host
  - export DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:@postgres:5432/python-test-app
  - apt-get update -qy
  - apt-get install -y python-dev python-pip
  - pip install -r requirements.txt
  - python manage.py test

staging:
  type: deploy
  script:
  - apt-get update -qy
  - apt-get install -y ruby-dev
  - gem install dpl
  - dpl --provider=heroku --app=gitlab-ci-python-test-staging --api-key=$HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY
  only:
  - master

production:
  type: deploy
  script:
  - apt-get update -qy
  - apt-get install -y ruby-dev
  - gem install dpl
  - dpl --provider=heroku --app=gitlab-ci-python-test-prod --api-key=$HEROKU_PRODUCTION_API_KEY
  only:
  - tags

This project has three jobs:

test - used to test Django application,

staging - used to automatically deploy staging environment every push to master branch

production - used to automatically deploy production environmnet for every created tag

Store API keys

You'll need to create two variables in Project > Variables:

HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY - Heroku API key used to deploy staging app,
HEROKU_PRODUCTION_API_KEY - Heroku API key used to deploy production app.

Comments

[Cynthia Sanchez]

Hi dnit13, where exactly is that path Project > Variables ? Im not finding it in Gitlab

[dnit13]

@CynthiaSanchez As described by Zsolt below, you will find the api key in your heroku account

[Fery W]

Make sure to add -q flag while pushing to heroku otherwise you'll reveal your $HEROKU_API_KEY at the end of your output.

[Théo Champion]

@Zsolt When I do that, the push is empty (the heroku build therefore fail), what I am missing here ? Do I need to make a dummy commit to init heroku:master ?

[dancypants]

running git remote add heroku ... in .gitlab-ci.yml sometimes causes fatal: remote heroku already exists changed it to git remote add heroku ... || true to force return code to 0

[MrKioZ]

It's at Settings > CI/CD > Environment variables

[Asriel]

This is not really a good idea. Some variables should be kept secret. A better answer would have been: "Make sure to only use protected variables on protected branches."