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Heroku is for Students

An easy-to-use platform for building, deploying, and managing apps. 

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Grow your skills on Heroku

As you’re learning a new language or concept, you want to focus your time on writing great code and building beautiful apps. Heroku gives you a simple path to getting your app projects up and running quickly — without getting sidetracked by managing servers and infrastructure.

Heroku supports student learning with a cloud-based, platform as a service (PaaS) for building, running, and managing apps. The platform gives you everything you need to do your best work, including a fully-managed runtime environment coupled with a wide range of tools and integrated services. We take care of DevOps, so you can focus on becoming a better developer.


Support for Developer Learning

Heroku’s flexibility allows you to build apps using the language or framework that you know best or love to use the most. It’s a great place to practice popular architectural patterns, such as microservices, or deployment methodologies, such as continuous delivery. When you run into issues, our robust documentation, support, and community resources are available to help you understand the root cause and troubleshoot quickly.

Many Heroku developers use a range of low-cost services to experiment, learn, and prototype new ideas. Some of our customers have even transformed their student projects into viable startup businesses on Heroku. When your app is ready to grow, Heroku’s operational experience offers built-in tools for easily scaling and maintaining application health.


Fast app deployment

The Heroku Platform helps you get your app projects up and running quickly. Deploy on every push to GitHub or from your own Git, build and push a Docker image, or choose one of the many other ways to deploy to Heroku.

Choice of language or framework

The platform adapts to your personal development style. Heroku officially supports eight popular development languages and frameworks. Heroku Buildpacks extend the build system to support additional languages or customizations.

Low-cost services for easy experimentation

Easily prototype new ideas or practice new concepts using low-cost services on Heroku. Many of our add-on providers also offer free add-on plans.

Simplified DevOps

Heroku is a fully-managed platform, which means our staff monitors uptime, performance, and infrastructure concerns. This frees you from the hassle of setting up and managing your own servers and hardware operations.

Integrated data services

Our cloud data services are optimized for developers. Quickly install a managed data store, such as Heroku PostgresHeroku Key-Value Store, MongoDB, JawsDB, and more, to easily persist, interact with, and manipulate data.

Ecosystem of add-on services

Extend the Heroku platform in a couple of clicks with fully-managed cloud services, like loggingmonitoring, or error tracking. Over 200+ Heroku Add-ons support every stage of app development and operation.

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Heroku for GitHub Students

A special offer for students enrolled in the GitHub Student Developer Pack.

Learn more about our Student Developer Pack

Enjoy the best part of app development

Heroku is meticulously designed to help developers be as productive as possible. The platform removes frustrating obstacles and mundane tasks, so you can stay free of distraction in your development flow. Wherever you are on the learning path, Heroku helps you love app development even more.

Low-Cost Services on Heroku

Heroku offers low-cost plans to help you learn and get started on the platform. Heroku Buttons and Buildpacks are free, and many Heroku Add-ons also offer a free plan. Experiment easily with different technologies to discover what works best for you and your apps.

Docs & Support

The Heroku Dev Center provides a wealth of information, including technical reference docs, getting started guides by language, learning resources, and more. The help portal connects you to support resources. We’re also proud of authoring the twelve-factor app manifesto.

Elements Marketplace

Find everything you need for your app, your stack, and your workflow in the Elements Marketplace. Our ecosystem of contributors provide code, tools, and fully-managed services to extend our runtime environment and make development faster and easier.

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“Heroku is founded on best practices for building and running apps in the cloud. The platform guides you, so everything goes smoothly and you save time.”

Mason Hale

Founder & CEO, Team Topia

Resources and Documentation

Developer Docs

How Heroku Works
Read a high-level technical description of the platform and key concepts.

Deployment on Heroku
Discover the many ways that you can deploy apps to Heroku, including Git, GitHub, and Docker.

Getting Started Guides
Find language-specific tutorials for deploying your first app and mastering the basics of Heroku.

Technical Reference & Learning
View a documentation library on Heroku products and features.

Download the Heroku CLI
Use the Heroku Command Line Interface (CLI) to create and manage apps directly from the terminal.

Heroku for GitHub Students
Register for the GitHub Student Developer Pack and receive platform credits to spend on any Heroku product for 12 months.

Tutorials & Best Practices

Heroku Showcase Videos
Learn more about Heroku through walkthroughs of various platform tools and workflows.

How to Prepare for Coding Interviews [Podcast]
Learn how to be successful in any programming interview in this discussion with Parker Phinney, creator of Interview Cake.

Becoming a Junior Developer [Podcast]
Transitioning into a career in tech can be intimidating and challenging. Two junior developers at Heroku share their experience.

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