Your App, Live, Easy
Have you written some cool applications with your favorite language? Do you like to make it public and show everyone what you have done? No worries. You don’t need to pay for anything. You don’t even need to setup a server from scratch neither. In this article, I’ll show you two options that are free and so fast to setup.
Glitch
Develop, edit, and then deploy your application in matter of seconds. Yes, it’s exactly what glitch offers. So, you can have public accessible address for your application without any IT infrastructure requirements. And guess what! It’s FREE 😉 The only disadvantage is that it doesn’t support several programming languages and it’s limited to HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Node.js. Also, you can import your web application files from your GitHub account. Give it a try: https://glitch.com/
- Sign up for an account
- Create a New Project or Import from GitHub
- Edit your files
- Click the Show Button.
- Do you see the address in your browser address bar? That’s your public address 😉 Enjoy it.
Well, that was a good idea to deploy the application such easy. But what if your application is developed using Python or other languages? There’s a better option.
Heroku
Heroku is a powerful cloud service. You can deploy your application on Heroku for free. By default, it supports several languages namely, Node, Java, Python, Scala, Ruby, PHP, Go, Clojure. Once your application is deployed, Heroku provides a public internet address for your application that can be accessed with any browser. You don’t need to set up any server or have any concerns about the infrastructure. Heroku does everything under the hood. But, Heroku is not an online code editor like Glitch is. So it’s needed to import your code to the Heroku platform. Heroku has made this easy using its CLI (Common Language Interface). The CLI handles all complexities of taking the code from your GitHub account and then imports the code to the Heroku platform for deployment. You need to follow these steps:
- Sign up in Heroku
- Install Git: Download
- Install Heroku CLI: Download
- Create a new App in the Heroku panel
- Once you create a new App on Heroku, it will give you a set of commands to set up your local machine and connect it to your new Heroku App.
I recommend to see this short video about Glitch and Heroku. It shows you how to set up your local machine for your very first project on the cloud 😉
There are several cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP (Google), etc. But, more features might lead to more complexity. You can choose any platform for your app but it depends on your requirements and expectations.