Context

Before Heroku, I tried many serverless/hosting services like Netlify and Vercel which are goods. But I wanted to deploy a spring-boot app. I think it's also doable with AWS.

For the POC, I keep it simple and prototype a library webapp.

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In order to make a full-stack web app on Heroku, I need to do 4 steps:

1. Database to store data
2. Backend to access and manipulate the database
3. To expose a restful API
4. Frontend to display the data

I choose to build database and backend, then frontend later (part 2)

Database and spring-boot backend on Heroku

1. Database on Heroku

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I simply follow this post to create a database on Heroku 😉

At the end of his post, he introduced 5 database explorers so I choose to go with the software TablePlus to visualize database content.

2. Create Spring boot backend

a. Create spring restful API

To build this part I found lots of resources actually:

• Jojozhuang post with image upload and git sources.
• Jojozhuang game-store-angular sample to play with the app.
• Jojozhuang deploying steps to Heroku
• Dzone Set up a Spring Boot Application with PostgreSQL full project sources
• Dariawan Spring Boot + JPA/Hibernate + PostgreSQL RESTful CRUD API Example
• Javaguides Spring Boot + PostgreSQL + JPA/Hibernate CRUD Restful API Tutorial
• Stackabuse Deploying Spring Boot Applications to Heroku

b. Issues faced

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java version

• Adapt the java versions according to the Heroku Supported Java versions post.

Postgres Database interaction

For the hibernate properties file

• Configuring MySQL Database
• Spring Data JPA ID Generators with Examples

For the Heroku database connection, the issue was Heroku is providing you a config var DATABASE_URL=postgres://username.password@localhost:5432/postgres

Unfortunatly, the correct spring.datasource.url format is this one DATABASE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1/postgres

Check bellow articles

• Heroku Spring application.properties file
• Deploying Spring Boot Applications to Heroku
• Spring Cloud Connectors and Heroku
• Correct PostgresSQL Connection URL for Springboot application in gitpod?
• Connecting to Heroku Postgres from Spring Boot

active profile

In order to be able to run the code locally and deployed on Heroku, you have to set up profiles AND/OR config variables.

• Spring documentation profiles
• Dev and Prod environment using different datasources

/* active profile by default */
spring.profiles.default=none
/* To specify your active profile you run on */
spring.profiles.active=dev,hsqldb

/* --- OR --- */

/* move your sensitive data to environment variables */
datasource.username = ${DB_USER_NAME}
datasource.password = ${DB_USER_PASSWORD}

c. Local and distant test

• Consume API with Postman (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
• Monitor database with TablePlus and web app backend

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Coming soon: PART 2 -Angular frontend