How to deploy a static website to Heroku

deploy-static-site-heroku.md

Gist

This is a quick tutorial explaining how to get a static website hosted on Heroku.

Why do this?

Heroku hosts apps on the internet, not static websites. To get it to run your static portfolio, personal blog, etc., you need to trick Heroku into thinking your website is a PHP app. This 6-step tutorial will teach you how.

Basic Assumptions

• You want to deploy some straight-up HTML, CSS, JS, maybe a few images. Nothing fancy here.
• You are in the root directory of your site (i.e. the directory that contains all subdirectories and files for the site)
• The root directory contains a main HTML page, e.g. index.html
• A Heroku app and remote are set up and ready to go

Steps

1. Add a file called composer.json to the root directory by running touch composer.json
2. Add a file called index.php to the root directory by running touch index.php
3. Rename the homepage (e.g. index.html) to home.html
4. In index.php, add the following line: <?php include_once("home.html"); ?>
5. In composer.json, add the following line: {}
6. Run git push heroku master

Done! Visit your deployed single-page website, hosted by Heroku (as a fake PHP app ☺).

Don't forget to add a Heroku app as a Git remote, you need to execute heroku git:remote -a yourapp.