How to deploy to Render: A Heroku Alternative
Every new beginning, comes from some other beginning’s end ~ Seneca
For those that aren’t familiar with Heroku, it is a Cloud Platform as a Service (CPAAS) that is really popular in the tech industry for their generous free hosting plan that recently came to a halt as of November 28, 2022. This affected a lot of students, hobbyists and individual developers in general that had been making use of the free hosting plan. While they do have a new program for eligible students, hobbyists are left in the wild to either upgrade their plan to a low-priced plan to continue utilizing their services or find another hosting platform.
This article will not be discussing Heroku alternatives, rather one alternative. It’s a bit hard finding another platform as simple to use with a free hosting plan like Heroku used to have. Which brings us to Render.
Render is similar to Heroku in many ways, some may argue even better. Considering the fact that developers are looking to host their applications on other hosting platforms, I will be giving us a step-by-step guide on how to deploy your first application on Render. Without further ado, let’s get started.
The first step is to head over to Render and create an account. A red circle would be used to emphasize where necessary.
After clicking on “Get Started”, you will be directed to the sign up page where you will be prompted to either sign up with Gitlab, Github, Google or to fill a sign up form. I signed up with Google since it’s faster.
Once you’re done signing up, you will be required to verify your account via a link sent to your email address. The link expires in 24 hours so do well to access the link as early as possible. After clicking the link, your account will be created. It may take a few minutes for it to reflect so don’t panic, refresh the page and you should see your dashboard displayed. Logging in for the first time with no existing deployments, your dashboard will be different from mine as I already have one live deployment. Don’t panic. Select “New” at the top right before your username and select “Web Service”.
You’ll be required to link your account to either Github or Gitlab using a git repository or an existing public repository URL. Link your account and follow the prompts to installing Render on your git repository account which in my case is Github. If you followed the prompts correctly your page should now look like this.
Click “Connect” beside the repository you wish to deploy. You’ll be required to fill out some information regarding your deployment. Give it a short simple name. Select the server region closest to you, Although, the closest to you should already be chosen by default. Select the branch you wish to deploy from. Just like Heroku, your server ports are randomly assigned to you by Render so make sure your port is not hardcoded into your source code.
Scroll down and select your runtime environment for your web service. You can leave your build command as “yarn” except you have an alternative configuration. Finally, fill in your start command to run the application after deployment.
Once you’re done filling out the necessary information, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you’ll find your pricing plan which should be free by default. After verifying that, simply click the “Create Web Service” and you’re good to go!
It may take a few minutes to build before you can access it but your URL will be generated and available once it goes live.
I hope this article was brief and helpful. Thanks for reading!
