Getting started with your migration from Heroku to Code Engine

Objectives

• Learn the similarities between Code Engine and Heroku.
• Learn the general process of deploying apps in Code Engine.
• Deploy an application from code on your local system with Code Engine.

Prerequisites

Before you can get started with Code Engine, you need to set up your account and install the CLI.

• All Code Engine users are required to have a Pay-as-you-Go account.

• While you can use Code Engine through the console, the examples in this documentation focus on the command line. Therefore, you must install the Code Engine CLI.

  ibmcloud plugin install code-engine
  

  For more information, see setting up the Code Engine CLI. For more information about the CLI, see Code Engine CLI reference.

Comparing Heroku and Code Engine terminology

Before you get started with deploying apps in Code Engine, learn the basics about Code Engine. The following table describes some high-level terminology differences between Cloud Foundry and Code Engine.

For more terms and capabilities for Code Engine, see Learn about Code Engine.

Log in to IBM Cloud

Follow these steps to log in to your IBM Cloud account and target a resource group.

1. Log in to the IBM Cloud CLI.

   ibmcloud login
   

2. Target a resource group by running the following command. To get a list of your resource groups, run ibmcloud resource groups.

   ibmcloud target -g <resource_group>
   

   Example output

   Targeted resource group default
   

Creating a project

A Code Engine "project" groups related workloads into a logical collection. You can group workloads into different projects based on whatever criteria that makes sense to you, for example, company organization structure, dependencies between the workloads, or development versus test versus production environments. You can then configure access to these projects. Keep in mind that workloads within a single project share a private network and are isolated within the security boundary of the project. All workloads within a project can talk to each other freely without concern of being seen by workloads outside of the cluster. If workloads in different projects want to communicate with each other, then the communication must either use the internet or an internal IBM private network. For more information, see Options for visibility for a Code Engine application.

Create a project in Code Engine called sample-proj.

ibmcloud ce project create --name sample-proj

Example output

Creating project 'sample-proj'...
ID for project 'sample-proj' is 'abcdabcd-abcd-abcd-abcd-abcd12e3456f7'.
Waiting for project 'sample-proj' to be active...
Now selecting project 'sample-proj'.
OK

Notice that your project is also selected for context, so all subsequent application-related commands are within the scope of this new sample-proj project.

Deploying your application

This sample application pulls code from the sample GitHub repository. This code is a simple Push your code to Code Engine by using the application create command. You must provide a name for your application and the location of the source code. The following example creates an application called myapp that uses the buildpack strategy and provides the location for the source code in the current directory (.).

ibmcloud ce app create --name myapp --build-source https://github.com/IBM/heroku-to-code-engine

Example output

Creating application 'myapp'...
Packaging files to upload from source path '.'...
Submitting build run 'myapp-run-220999-210706331'...
Creating image 'private.us.icr.io/ce--6ef04-khxrbwa0lci/app-myapp:220418-0207-askql'...
Waiting for build run to complete...
Build run status: 'Running'
Build run completed successfully.
Run 'ibmcloud ce buildrun get -n myapp-run-220000-210706331' to check the build run status.
Waiting for application 'myapp' to become ready.
Configuration 'myapp' is waiting for a Revision to become ready.
Ingress has not yet been reconciled.
Waiting for load balancer to be ready.
Run 'ibmcloud ce application get -n myapp' to check the application status.
OK

https://myapp.abcdbwa0lci.us-south.codeengine.appdomain.cloud

And that's it. You now have an internet-facing application. The code in the application itself is the same as what is used for a Heroku application, it's just the Code Engine commands that are slightly different.

Let's take a deeper look at the previous app create command. Notice that the output of the app create command provides information about the progression of the build run before the app is created and deployed.

1. Code Engine receives a request to create an application from source code (instead of pulling directly from an image).
2. Code Engine checks for an IAM service ID and API key that is associated with the selected project. This service ID must be authorized to read and write to IBM Cloud Container Registry. If no service ID exists, Code Engine creates one for you. Note that this service ID is used for subsequent Code Engine build requests that are run from the same project.
3. This example builds code from a public GitHub repository (--build-source https://github.com/IBM/heroku-to-code-engine). The source code is packed into an archive file and uploaded to a managed namespace within the IBM Cloud Container Registry instance in your account. Note that you can target only IBM Cloud Container Registry for your local builds. For more information about IBM Container Registry, including information about quota limits and access, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Container Registry.
4. Code Engine builds your source code into an image. The source image is created in the same namespace as your source archive file.
5. After the build completes, your application is deployed. You can access your application from the provided URL.

With Code Engine, you automatically get many of the same features as Heroku, such as autoscaling and blue-green roll-out of updates, but you'll also enjoy the benefits of newer features such as scaling down-to-zero, ensuring that you are not charged if your application is not active.

Want to learn more about your options for building your source code? See the application create and the job create commands.

Want to learn more about applications and jobs? See Working with apps in Code Engine and Working with jobs and jobruns.

Clean up

After you finish this tutorial, you can clean up the resources that you created with the following commands.

Delete your application

ibmcloud ce app delete --name myapp

When you delete your app, the associated build files are also deleted.

Lastly, delete the images that the build created from IBM Cloud Container Registry.

1. Navigate to Registry in the IBM Cloud console.
2. Find the archive and the image that are associated with your application by searching for your application name.
3. Select the archive and image and delete.

Video transcript

Hi, my name is JJ Asghar and I'm a developer advocate for IBM Cloud. Recently, you might have heard about Heroku changing their policy on free - the free tier. It's causing a challenge for a lot of developers out there so I want to take a handful of moments here to show you how you can migrate from Heroku to Code Engine from IBM Cloud in just a handful of steps. So let's go ahead and start playing around with it and see how quickly you can actually make your system work.

So first thing first, if you haven't seen it this is the actual line inside the official blog from Heroku, starting on November 28, 2022, we plan to stop free - offering the free product plans and plan on shutting down the free dynos and data services. We'll be sending out a series of email communications to affected users. This is challenging for a lot of beginner beginner web applications. I know for a fact personally I used Heroku when I first started back in the day so this is a pretty large hit for a lot of people and I want to show you how easy it is to convert from Heroku to Code Engine.

So first thing first, let's actually see a nice little application I've created. If I go ahead and bring up my application here, we have a nice little flask app. If you don't know what python is or flask is, it's a it's a format for python to be able to run an application on a standard port. So let's say we have this application; it says “Hello World!”. I've already deployed it and we can check out right here We have our amazing production app at heroku.com. It says “hello world” and we want to go ahead and change it. We wanted to update it so I'm going to go ahead and quickly update it to “Hello Moving from Heroku to Code Engine”.

Let’s go ahead and come out of it. git add . git commit -m “update hello line”. Then I'm going to go ahead and push and just like you would normally do to push code to Heroku. I want to show you that this is the exact same process inside of Code Engine. What we'll do is, we'll create a new … we'll log in to IBM Cloud first and then from there we'll create a new project and then we'll go ahead and deploy it to see that it works.

So there we go, we've gone ahead and deployed it to Heroku first ,just to make sure that we all have our working code and I go ahead and reload this and there we go we're moving from Heroku to Code Engine so we know our code works. This is great.

So now actually let's get Code Engine as part of this, so first thing first, we need to IBM Cloud log in. So I'm going to go ahead and log in to IBM Cloud. If you haven't set up IBM Cloud video or if you haven't set up your IBM Cloud account, if you look above, me you should see a link to it, which I will put into the video.

I'll go ahead and copy my name here and then I'll take my password, log in just fine, which is great to see, perfect. And now what I'll do is ibmcloud ce project create —name amazing product production app. So this create our nice, little… Target first. I’ll get my default resource group and then I'll go ahead and create the project. There we go. Should only take a moment - perfect. Now you can change your name to whatever you like. This is just a catch-all for your project, which is useful. Then I will take the next command, which is ibmcloud ce app create —name pythonbackend — build-source . —strategy build packs

Now because I already have a requirements.txt, this will be, this application is smart enough to figure out, “hey it's a python application! So let's go ahead and build it!", which is nice. So as you can see, it's taking step one here. It's running the build, which is good. It creates a nice, private image for us too, which is useful. It takes a couple moments. There we go and now we see that if we wanted to do this with no wait, which is the -nw, we can actually put this into the background and wait for it to come up and then we can check it via this build run get the actual name. Being that we're going to be looking at this live, we'll go ahead and do this here.

Perfect! So now I go ahead and open up the this URL here and it came over here and as you can see

“hello moving from Heroku to Code Engine”

And that's it. I took the exact same code I did from Heroku. I created a new project and then I created an application and I just pushed it and it just worked so imagine what you can do with that for yourself. This shows the power that is Code Engine and on a free tier it is truly free - just like Heroku was or will be or was will won't be in the future. Code Engine is free forever, which is great and hopefully, it'll make your life a little easier.

Thanks so much for watching and if you have any questions, my Twitter handle is @jjasghar or you're more than welcome to email me at awesome@ibm.com. My job is to be a personable nerd so never hesitate to reach out.

Thanks so much.

Bye y'all.