Deploying Node to Heroku

This section describes how to deploy your GraphQL service with production-ready Engine features. Before starting, make sure you have added Engine to your GraphQL server. If you haven’t built a GraphQL server yet, check out our tutorial first and then come back when you’re ready to deploy!

This guide is specifically made for Node GraphQL servers. For non-Node servers, we recommend using the launcher API which is a small Node script packaged with apollo-engine used to run Engine as a standalone proxy server.

1. Configure environment variables

Engine will get your API key from the ENGINE_API_KEY environment variable by default, so you just need to create an ApolloEngine with no options:

import { ApolloEngine } from 'apollo-engine';
const engine = new ApolloEngine();

The API key represents your service’s secret ID in Engine. To get one, log into the Engine UI and create a service.

Also, for Heroku we need to make sure to get the port for our application from an environment variable provided by Heroku:

// Set a default value of 3000 if we don't pass an env var
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;

engine.listen({
  port: PORT,
  expressApp: app
}, () => {
  console.log(`Server running on port ${PORT}!`);
});

2. Create and set up a new Heroku application

Log into the Heroku dashboard. Then click “New” > “Create New App” in the top right

Name your app and hit “Create app”

Select a deployment method. GitHub is a common choice, which requires selecting a repository:

Put you Apollo Engine API key in the environment. Under the “Settings” tab, click “Reveal Config Vars”. Next copy your key from the Engine UI as the value for ENGINE_API_KEY.

3. Try it out and build more!

Send a query to your GraphQL service at your Heroku Application at <APP NAME>.herokuapp.com and then check out the tracing data in the Engine UI.

To get the most out of Engine, read on about some of the features:

• Performance tracing will help you learn how your GraphQL execution is working.
• Caching will enable you to reduce load on your server and reduce response times.