Migrate from Heroku to Vercel

Deprecation of Heroku free resources

Starting November 28, 2022, free Heroku Dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis® plans will no longer be available. We will begin to scale down existing dynos and delete databases with free plans on this date. You also can’t provision new dynos or databases on free plans.

Heroku Blog Announcement

With a few Angular projects hosted on Heroku, I needed to find a free and fast alternative. I decided on Vercel.

Vercel

Vercel Inc., formerly Zeit, is an American cloud platform as a service company. The company maintains the Next.js web development framework. Vercel's architecture is built around Jamstack, and deployments are handled through Git repositories.

Create an account

Vercel Docs

Steps to migrate

In the project folder:

• Delete Procfile
• Update package.json. Replace "start:heroku": "node dist/PROJECT_NAME/server/main", with "vercel-build": "npm run build:ssr"
• In project root create a new directory: api. In this folder create index.js and add this code:

const server = require('../dist/PROJECT_NAME/server/main');  
module.exports = server.app();

• In project root, create vercel.json and add this code:

    {
        "version": 2,
        "public": true,
        "name": "test-universal",
        "rewrites": [
          { "source": "/(.*)", "destination": "/api" }
        ],
        "functions": {
          "api/index.js": {
            "includeFiles": "dist/PROJECT_NAME/browser/**"
          }
        }
    }

In the project folder, open terminal window:

1. git remote rm heroku
2. git init
3. git remote add origin https://github.com/GIT_NAME-git/REPO.git
4. git branch -M main
5. git push -u origin main

Open your Vercel dashboard and import the Git repository into Vercel.

Result

Vercel will build and deploy your project if no errors. I had one error which was fixed by changing Node version to 14x in project settings.
Mumble