Deploy a Quarkus Java application on Heroku

February 7, 2021

I was giving Quarkus a try and so I created a simple web application to learn more about it. It's just a website that process some markdown files and serves some HTML pages.

I wanted to do a little test hosting it in a real place. I remembered I had an account on Heroku, so I thought I should try to deploy this little Quarkus application there.

To deploy the application on Heroku, I needed to create two extra files: the system.properties to choose Java 11 (by default Heroku compiles and runs on Java 8) and the Procfile to customize the start command.

system.properties

java.runtime.version=11

Procfile

web: java -Dquarkus.http.port=$PORT -jar target/rka-blog-quarkus-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-runner.jar

Using the heroku command line client, the steps were:

heroku login

After logging in with your Heroku account, create a Heroku application:

heroku create

This will create a Heroku application with a random name and the command output will show a git repository. Now configure your project to use git:

git init
git branch -M main
git add .
git commit -m "first commit"

Configure your project adding a remote called heroku with the git url shown before and do a git push:

git remote add heroku <git url from heroku create output>

git push heroku main

It will compile and deploy your application on Heroku.

After following these steps I could access the application on my browser using the http url shown by the heroku create command. For this test I deployed the application as a runner jar, I didn't compile the project as a native executable.