Heroku

Heroku makes hosting simple, but most developers overlook its advanced capabilities. After years of running apps on the platform, I’ve found several underrated features that speed up your workflow and make your apps more reliable. Here are seven you shouldn’t miss. 1. Preboot Preboot spins up new dynos and starts routing traffic to them before the old ones are terminated. The result is seamless, zero-downtime deployments. The tricky part is knowing when the cutover is complete, since the Heroku dashboard doesn’t show it. Use this command to confirm when the new dynos are live: ...

When hosting an application on Heroku, managing logs efficiently is crucial for maintaining system health and keeping costs down. Heroku provides built-in logging for all incoming requests, but by default, Gunicorn, the Python HTTP server often used in Heroku deployments, also logs incoming requests. This duplication can clutter your logs, making them harder to parse and more expensive to store. Let’s explore why this redundancy exists and how to fix it. Heroku Router Logs Heroku’s Router automatically logs all incoming HTTP requests, providing a wealth of data for monitoring and debugging your application. These logs are always enabled and include detailed information, such as the HTTP method and URL path of the request, the response status code, the client’s IP address, and the request processing time (see Heroku Router Log Format). ...