Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Akhil Naidu
Akhil Naidu

Posted on

Can I successfully run Forem in Heroku with a Hobby plan?

I tried many different ways to host Forem on my dedicated server with specifications as follows.

  • Intel Xeon Quad-Core Processor
  • 8GB RAM
  • 240GB SSD
  • 1TB Bandwidth

Because of these specifications, I never faced any problems creating a development instance but almost certainly failed to create my own production instance. My trials are as follows:

Why I'm obsessed with hosting it on a VPS/Dedicated Server

Even though I knew that hosting this application on Heroku is far easier compared to that on a personal server, I always tend to prefer my dedicated server; it is because of these reasons.

  • I like to SSH into my server and do this manually
  • I care about hosting everything in one place, rather than distributing them on various clouds
  • One of my friends has his own data centre. I get things for free of cost

What is my only alternative

I love Forem/Dev, so I have to host it on my own, to get a taste of it as an admin. So I started using Heroku. As mentioned above, it was not easier to configure things even in Heroku; just the sheer amount of ENV VARIABLES Forem provide too much for an individual to handle.

So I started creating all the different account required, and in a few days, I was able to configure all the ENV VARIABLES. Even then, I'm facing an issue with Elastic Search. -_-

I'm highly demotivated, but fortunately, I realised Heroku's advantage that we could host our Elastic Search and backlink it to Heroku using ENV VARIABLES. Also, elastic. co have a 30 days trial period to test Elastic Search on the cloud.

Awesome! Now I was able to my production server.

Why I am here

My happiness didn't last long; soon, I faced a huge error! The moment I created an admin account and entered it into the admin section, Heroku could not handle it.

I was here to ask the community, what is the best plan for me to choose in Heroku?. Remember, I want to test in production, not creating my production server. In fact, I was planning it to get hosted by the Forem team itself; I wrote a mail and submitted a request for that too.

Can I get off with Heroku Hobby Plan? Eagerly waiting for someone from the team to clear my issue.

Oldest comments (1)

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Siddharth Chaudhary

How did you create a dev instance?
I can't even get that to work.