Heroku now officially supports .NET!
.NET developers now have access to the officially supported buildpack for .NET, which means you can now deploy your .NET apps onto Heroku with just one command: git push heroku main. 🤯 Gone are the days of searching for Dockerfiles or community buildpacks. With official support, .NET developers can now run any .NET application (version 8.0 and higher) on the Heroku platform.
Being on the platform means you also get:
- Simple, low friction deployment
- Scaling and service management
- Access to the add-on ecosystem
- Security and governance features for enterprise use
Intrigued? Let’s talk about what this means for .NET developers.
Why This Matters for .NET Developers
In my experience, running an app on Heroku is pretty easy. But deploying .NET apps was an exception. You could deploy on Heroku, but there wasn’t official support. One option was to wrap your app in a Docker container. This meant creating a Dockerfile and dealing with all the maintenance that comes along with that approach. Alternatively, you could find a third-party buildpack; but that introduced another dependency into your deployment process, and you’d lose time trying to figure out which community buildpack was the right one for you.
Needing to use these workarounds was unfortunate, as Heroku’s seamless deployment is supposed to make it easy to create and prototype new apps. Now, with official buildpack support, the deployment experience for .NET developers is smoother and more reliable.
Key Benefits of .NET on Heroku
The benefits of the new update center around simplicity and scalability. It all begins with simple deployment. Just one git command… and your deployment begins. No need to start another workflow or log into another site every time; just push your code from the command line, and Heroku takes care of the rest.
Heroku’s official .NET support currently includes C#, Visual Basic, and F# projects for .NET and ASP.NET Core frameworks (version 8.0 and higher). This means that a wide variety of .NET projects are now officially supported. Want to deploy a Blazor app alongside your ASP.NET REST API? You can do that now.
Coming into the platform also means you can scale as your app grows. If you need to add another service using a different language, you can deploy that service just as easily as your original app. Or you can easily scale your dynos to match peak load requirements. This scaling extends to Heroku’s ecosystem of add-ons, making it easy for you to add value to your application with supporting services while keeping you and your team focused on your core application logic.
In addition to simple application deployment, the platform also supports more advanced CI/CD and DevOps needs. With Heroku Pipelines, you have multiple deployment environment support options and can set up review apps so code reviewers can access a live version of your app for each pull request. And all of this integrates tightly with GitHub, giving you automatic deployment triggers to streamline your dev flow.
Getting Started
Let’s do a quick walk-through on how to get started. In addition to your application and Git, you will also need the Heroku CLI installed on your local machine. Initialize the CLI with the heroku login command. This will take you to a browser to log into your Heroku account:
Once you’re logged in, navigate to your .NET application folder. In that folder, run the following commands:
~/project$ heroku create
~/project$ heroku buildpacks:add heroku/dotnet
Now, you’re ready to push your app! You just need one command to go live:
~/project$ git push heroku main
That’s it! For simpler .NET applications, this is all you need. Your application is now live at the app URL provided in the response to your heroku create command. To see it again, you can always use heroku info. Or, you can run heroku open to launch your browser at your app URL.
If you can’t find the URL, log in to the Heroku Dashboard. Find your app and click on Open app. You’ll be redirected to your app URL.
If you have a more complex application or one with multiple parts, you will need to define a Procfile, which will tell Heroku how to start up your application. Don’t be intimidated! Many Procfiles are just a couple lines. For more in-depth information, check out the Getting Started on Heroku with .NET guide.
Now we’ve got another question to tackle…
Who Should Care?
The arrival of .NET on Heroku is relevant to anyone who wants to deploy scalable .NET services and applications seamlessly.
For solo devs and startups, the platform’s low friction and scaling takes away the burden of deployment and hosting. This allows small teams to focus on building out their core application logic. These teams are also not restricted by their app’s architecture, as Heroku supports both large single-service applications as well as distributed microservice apps.
Enterprise teams are poised to benefit from this as well. .NET has historically found much of its adoption in the enterprise, and the addition of official support for .NET to Heroku means that these teams can now combine their .NET experience with the ease of deploying to the Heroku platform. Heroku’s low friction enables rapid prototyping of new applications, and Dyno Formations make it easier to manage and scale a microservice architecture. Additionally, you can get governance through Heroku Enterprise, enabling the security and controls that larger enterprises require.
Finally, .NET enthusiasts from all backgrounds and skill levels can now benefit from this new platform addition. By going with a modern PaaS, you can play around with apps and projects of all sizes, hassle-free.
Wrap-up
That’s a brief introduction to official .NET support on Heroku! It’s now easier than ever to deploy .NET applications of all sizes to Heroku. What are you going to build and deploy first? Let me know in the comments!
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