Deploy your app for free

Heroku is an app hosting company that offers a free tier. Heroku manages all of the hardware and administrative aspects of hosting a web app. All we need to do is instruct Heroku how to run the web app.

Prerequisites

Heroku requires some comfort with the command line interface and Git.

Create a Heroku app

First, sign up for a free Heroku account and set up the Heroku CLI. Then, open a terminal and run the following commands (replacing example as appropriate).

mkdir example
cd example
git init
heroku create example --buildpack heroku/jvm

The heroku/jvm buildpack specifies that the app will require a Java virtual machine runtime. To specify the Java version, create a new system.properties file with the desired version.

java.runtime.version=11

Tell Heroku how to run your app

Create a new PROCFILE to tell Heroku how to run your app.

web: javac Server.java && java Server

This instructs the Heroku web server to execute javac Server.java && java Server.

Push your app to Heroku

Commit the web app code to the Git repository.

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Then, push the commits to Heroku.

git push heroku master

If everything’s working properly, your web app is now accessible on the worldwide web!

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