There are a lot of detailed steps involved in the setup. This table will help you understand the big picture.
If the explanations in the "why" column don't make perfect sense yet, don't stress about it. There is more detail on the "why" part at each step. If you are still unclear after reading those more detailed explanations, then ask questions.
What you'll do | Why you are doing it |
---|---|
Create a heroku account | So that you can set up webapps to run in the cloud |
Set up access to the heroku toolbelt on CSIL | So that you can manipulate the webapps you are setting up (starting and stopping them, for example.) |
Make sure you have access to pip to install Python addons private to your account |
You need some Python add-ons to do webapps, and pip allows you to set these up. |
This part is easy. Go to http://heroku.com and sign up for a "free" account.
You'll be asked for:
- First Name and Last Name
- Email. We suggest you use your school email account (e.g. @umail.ucsb.edu for UCSB, or @ucsd.edu for UCSD, etc.)
- Company (you may leave this blank).
- Preferred Development Language: We suggest you select "Python".
A note on this "preferred development langauge": Setting this to Python just customizes the site to give you appropriate suggestions for what to do next. This doesn't prevent you from using the account with other languages later—you can still access all the features of Heroku for all the supported languages (e.g. Ruby, Java, etc.) even if you never change this.
Make a note of your username and your password.
- You may be asked to share your username with your instructor
- Note that you should NOT NEED to share your password with anyone, not even your instructor.
- You should also not need to save your password in a plain text file at any time.
- You may be asked to type it in occasionally though, so do make sure it is one you remember.
- If you need to reset it, you can do so at http://heroku.com
Unless Heroku has changed something since this was written, you should not need to enter a credit card for any of the work we'll ask you to do in this course.
If you are asked for credit card, then:
- Either you are doing something wrong, or something has changed since these instructions were written.
- That's a good time to check the instructions, and/or ask for help.