Heroku is one of the most popular PAAS provider, I am using this to show serve a very small yet impactful service: Redirect various product url from a single source.
Example first, I maintain a date conversion library (which we migrated to Jest). In order to share its url to all, I can give the Github url to them. Or, I can create a subdomain in my primary domain and redirect visitors to that particular Github page.
The second approach will give a bit personalized touch than the former one. So, I took this aproach and I’ve implemented the redirection via Python3 and Flask; and made use of heroku apps to scale it. Once it was published via Heroku, I created custom DNS direction in Cloudflare and the resultant heroku app is served via http://redirect.mythicangel.com/bangladatejs url. Being in PAAS system, it is cloud native and scalable 🙂
So, what are the steps? Follow in this order:
- Create a new python app by following official instruction from Heroku.
Just remember 2 thing:- If you’re using Ubuntu, then don’t follow their guideline to install cli from source. Instead download it via snap command.
- Must use virtualenv to avoid the installation mess of python2 and python3.
- Go to the app’s Settings and add a new custom domain which you want to add. You may have to verify your account beforehand via credit card
- Once you add the custom domain, heroku will give you corresponding value for DNS target. Copy this url
- Go to cloudflare and open DNS tab of the domain (where the subdomain will be created)
- Add a new record of type “CNAME” (bydefault A will be selected). In the subdomain field, give your desired subdomain (e.g. redirect as in my case) and in the CNAME field, give the DNS value from step-iii.
- Done 🙂