Heroku Flow brings together Heroku Pipelines, Review Apps, Heroku CI, and GitHub Integration into an easy-to-use structured workflow for continuous delivery, so you can test early and deploy often, with better results for your users.

App-centric continuous delivery, optimized for developers

Professional workflow in seconds

Organize your pipeline by connecting your GitHub repo, and then automatically or manually placing your Heroku apps in dev, staging or production environments. Simultaneously develop features on dev branches that are reflected by disposable review apps, run tests on every push to GitHub with Heroku CI, merge pull requests, auto deploy to staging, and control who promotes to production.

Complete visualization of code delivery

Always know where a particular feature is on the path to production with the real-time Pipelines overview in the Heroku Dashboard. The Pipelines overview provides a single page view of the current relationships between apps, giving your team the state of development across all your environments. With Heroku CI you can see every test run resulting from a push to GitHub.

Better quality, tighter iterations

For every open Pull Request, Heroku can spin up a complete disposable environment called a Review App on a unique URL. Every push to a branch in GitHub triggers Heroku CI to run tests. Now everyone can contribute to feature testing early in the product life cycle for speedier decisions and better quality. You can keep staging and production environments identical to catch flaws before your users do.

Heroku Teams

When combined with Heroku Pipelines, Review Apps, Heroku CI, and GitHub Integration, Heroku Teams makes it even easier to embrace continuous delivery. Pipelines structure your team’s review, staging and production apps so members with the right roles and permissions can collaborate on continuous delivery for more frequent, higher quality releases.

  • With Heroku CI, we can use the same service to test, deploy, and deliver code. When combined with Heroku Pipelines, Heroku CI lets us easily manage all of our CI/CD automation across multiple apps and environments.

    SuperHi Rik Lomas Founder and CEO, SuperHi

  • With inclusion of Heroku’s Pipelines feature, our team has a very robust and efficient method of development, testing, and deployment. We like it!

    University of the Nations Darrel Stone Engineer, University of the Nations

  • Heroku’s Review Apps feature is an integral part of our deployment process. Both our engineering and product teams use it to test code and the overall user experience.

    charity: water Matthew Eckstein VP of Engineering, charity: water Read the dev interview >>

  • We ship to production multiple times a day, and Heroku’s Review Apps has become central to our process. It’s so easy for us to spin up a Review App for the team to validate and approve a new feature before it ships.

    Bonobos Tim Julien Vice President of Engineering, Bonobos Inc.

  • We started using Heroku Pipelines as soon as it was released and now we use it for continuous delivery of all our microservices.

    ZeroCater Rob Adams Engineering Manager, ZeroCater Read customer story >>

  • Heroku Release Phase has replaced the need to manually run database migrations, as well as update our Elasticsearch schema during deployment. It helps to automate our deploys and makes it easier to get code out the door.

    Tony Cassanego Co-founder and CTO, DocSend Read customer story >>

  • We use Heroku Release Phase to automatically run database schema updates. It has significantly increased our deploy-time availability by guaranteeing that new requests don’t hit our updated app code until database changes have been completed. It’s fantastic.

    Bill Curtis Co-Founder and CTO, Sweet Tooth Read customer story >>
Documentation

Heroku Pipelines

Heroku CI

Review Apps

GitHub Integration

See it in action
  1. Create a Pipeline
  2. Configure automatic deploys
  3. Enable Review Apps
  4. Enable Heroku CI
  5. Open a pull request
  6. Pull request triggers Heroku CI to run tests
  7. Merge the PR to deploy to staging
  8. Promote to production

New to continuous delivery, or have unanswered questions?

Learn more about continuous delivery >>

Heroku Flow brings together five key capabilities for continuous delivery

Heroku Pipelines

Heroku Pipelines Read docs

Pipelines is a way to organize a group of Heroku apps sharing the same codebase into review, development, staging, and production environments to support, manage and visualize continuous delivery. Promoting tested code from one stage to the next can be done manually or automatically and is nearly instantaneous, since the compiled artifact is promoted to the next stage. The Pipelines overview page in the Heroku Dashboard tracks the real-time progress of code and features from development to production.

Heroku CI

Heroku CI Read docs

Heroku CI is a low-configuration test runner that integrates with Heroku Pipelines. Heroku CI runs your test scripts with zero queue time for faster results, using disposable apps that have strong parity with your staging and production environments. Access test results from Heroku or GitHub, automate deployments conditionally on CI results, and take advantage of a fully visual interface built to support CI’s role in team-based continuous delivery.

Heroku Review Apps

Review Apps Read docs

Review apps are a new way to propose, discuss and decide whether to merge changes to your code base. For Heroku apps connected to GitHub, Heroku can manually or automatically spin up a temporary test app on a unique URL for every opened pull request (PR). The temporary app is auto-updated on every commit, so instead of guessing about what the code might do, reviewers can actually try the changes in a browser. Merging the PR destroys the review app and, when used with pipelines, automatically promotes the code to staging.

Heroku GitHub Integration

GitHub Integration Read docs

Connect your GitHub repo to a Heroku app to either manually or automatically deploy a particular branch on every GitHub push. For every deploy you can see the diff between the current release and the previous commit in the app’s Activity tab in the Heroku Dashboard, so you’re never guessing what code is on the app. If you’ve configured your GitHub repo to use an external continuous integration (CI) server, you can configure Heroku to only auto-deploy a branch after CI passes for a particular commit.

Heroku Release Phase

Release Phase Read docs

Release Phase lets you run tasks before a release is deployed to production, eliminating maintenance windows, and reducing deployment risk. Migrate a database, upload assets to a CDN, invalidate a cache or run any other task your app needs to be ready for production. If a Release Phase task fails, the new release is not deployed, leaving the current production release unaffected.