Auto Deployment of Badgeyay Backend by Heroku Pipeline

Badgeyay project is now divided into two parts, front-end of Ember JS and back-end with REST-API programmed in Python. One of the jobs challenges is that it should support uncoupled architecture. Now, we have to integrate Heroku deployed API with GitHub, which should auto deploy every Pull Request made to the Development Branch and help in easing the Pull Request review process.

In this blog, I’ll be discussing how I have configured Heroku Pipeline to auto deploy every Pull request made to the Development Branch and help in easing the Pull Request review process  in Badgeyay in my Pull Request.

First, Let’s understand Heroku Pipeline and its features. Then we will move on to configuring the Pipeline file to run auto deploy PR. Let’s get started and understand it step by step.

What is Heroku Pipeline ?

A pipeline is a group of Heroku apps that share the same codebase. Each app in a pipeline represents one of the following steps in a continuous delivery workflow:

• Review
• Development
• Staging
• Production

A common Heroku continuous delivery workflow has the following steps:

• A developer creates a pull request to make a change to the codebase.
• Heroku automatically creates a review app for the pull request, allowing    developers to test the change.
• When the change is ready, it’s merged into the codebase Default branch.
• The Default branch is automatically deployed to staging for further testing.
• When it’s ready, the staging app is promoted to production, where the change is available to end users of the app.

In badgeyay, I have used Review App and Development App steps for auto deployment of Pull Request.

Prerequisites:

• You should have admin rights of the GitHub Repository.
• You should be the owner of the Heroku deployed app.
• For creating a Review App , Below mentioned files are needed to be in the root of the project repository to trigger the Heroku Build.

1. App.json 
{ "name": "BadgeYay-API", 
  "description": "A fully functional REST API for badges generator using flask",                   
  "repository": "https://github.com/fossasia/badgeyay/backend/", 
  "keywords": [
  			"badgeyay", 
            "fossasia", 
            "flask"
   ], 
   "buildpacks": [
   			{ 
            "url": "heroku/python" 
            }
         ] 
}

2. Procfile web: gunicorn --pythonpath backend/app/ main:app

Now, I have fulfilled all the prerequisites needed for integrating Github repository to Heroku Deployed Badgeyay API. Let’s move to Heroku Dashboard of the Badgeyay API and implement auto deployment of every Pull Request.

Step 1 :

Open the Heroku Deployed App on the dashboard. Yow will see following tabs in top of the dashboard.

Step 2 :

Click on Deploy and first create a new pipeline by giving a name to it and choose a stage for the pipeline.

Step 3 :

• Choose a Deployment Method. For the badgeyay project, I have  integrated GitHub for auto deployment of PR.
• Select the repository and connect with it.
• You will receive a pop-up which will ensure that repository is connected to Heroku.

Step 4 :
Enable automatic deploys for the Github repository.

Step 5 :

Now after adding the pipeline, present app get nested under the pipeline. Click on the pipeline name on the top and now we have a pipeline dashboard like this :

Step 6:

Now for auto deployment of PR, enable Review Apps by filling the required information like this :

Step 7:

Verify by creating a test PR after following every above mentioned steps.

Now we are all done with setting up auto deployment of every pull request to badgeyay repository.

This is how I have configured Heroku Pipeline to auto deploy every Pull request made to the Development Branch and help in easing the Pull Request review process.

About Author :

I have been contributing in open source organization FOSSASIA, where I’m working on a project called BadgeYaY. It is a badge generator with a simple web UI to add data and generate printable badges in PDF.

Resources:

• Heroku Pipelines Article – Link