Using Laravel (and Laravel Elixir) on Heroku

I've just started playing with Heroku for some of my Laravel projects as they support PHP 7, and it seemed like Laravel was almost ready to run out of the box. In fact, there's a great get started guide for using Laravel on Heroku and it couldn't be much simpler. However, I do have some tweaks to

Heroku recommend changing your logger in config/app.php to errorlog so that the app errors are made available through the command line tools. Instead of changing the file you can just set the APP_LOG environment variable and it will work the same.

heroku config:set APP_LOG=errorlog

To get your assets running you'll need to make a couple of changes to get Node installed and gulp run after it's all good to go. First off, add the heroku/nodejs buildpack (in addition to the heroku/php buildpack you have already).

heroku buildpacks:add heroku/nodejs

This means your Node dependencies (in your package.json file) will now be installed on deployment - with one caveat. It won't install any of your devDependencies which is where Laravel puts it's front-end dependencies (and it's likey you have too). You can either make all your dependencies just dependencies and Heroku will install them, otherwise you can set another environment variable to tell Heroku to install all the dependencies - including development dependencies.

heroku config:set NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=false

Finally we just need to tell Heroku to run Gulp after a deployment when the dependencies have been installed. This is easy by adding a postinstall script in your package.json. This is what it looks like with the other standard Laravel scripts (you might want to add them if you don't already have them).

  "scripts": {
    "prod": "gulp --production",
    "dev": "gulp watch",
    "postinstall": "npm run prod"
  },

The prod and dev scripts just run Gulp for you with an alias (for example, npm run dev) and are now there by default in new releases of Laravel. Heroku will run postinstall automatically and build your assets for production.

Easy enough - you'll now have logging and asset building working with Laravel on Heroku.