Heroku is a very well known hosting for web applications. It has a free plan useful for testing purposes, and paid options to deploy the website.
It offers a wide variety of addons and it's one of the most flexible PAAS around.
They are PHP friendly, and they have a great "Getting Started with PHP on Heroku" guide at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-php#introduction, and it will be the base of the instruction set.
Let's see how to install Grav on Heroku.
First, sign up for Heroku.
Download the Heroku CLI, which is a command-line utility needed to deploy create and deploy your site.
Once installed, type
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] heroku login [/prism]
Enter your credentials.
Now checkout the PHP "Getting Started" example they provide in your local web root, so you can test locally the site prior to deploying it.
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] git clone https://github.com/heroku/php-getting-started.git your-folder [/prism]
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] cd your-folder [/prism]
Now deploy your app with
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] heroku create [/prism]
and
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] git push heroku master [/prism]
Ensure that at least one instance of the app is running:
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] heroku ps:scale web=1 [/prism]
and open the site in the browser:
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] heroku open [/prism]
You should now see the sample PHP project. Now that all is set, you're ready to go on and run Grav instead of the sample site.
First, delete the web/ folder in your current site folder.
Copy your Grav site files there, making sure you're also copying the .htaccess hidden file. Overwrite all the files that were existing.
Now open the Procfile file. This is a Heroku-specific file. Change the line to
[prism classes="language-text"] web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 ./ [/prism]
You should make sure the site works locally, prior to uploading it to Heroku, just to ensure the are no errors.
Now commit to the repository with
git add . ; git commit -am 'Added Grav'
Then edit composer.json and add post deploy command to the scripts section as in
[prism classes="language-json line-numbers"] "scripts": { "compile": [ "bin/grav install", "bin/gpm install quark -y" ] } [/prism]
and commit that to the repository with
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] git add . ; git commit -am 'Add post deploy bin/grav install' [/prism]
Then run
[prism classes="language-bash command-line"] git push heroku master [/prism]
and the site should be good to go!
Due to the ephemeral nature of Heroku's filesystem, all needed plugins or themes must be added to composer.json just like above and kept there so they are installed every time the site is pushed to Heroku. For example, if you need the admin plugin and a theme, add them in composer like in
[prism classes="language-json line-numbers"] "scripts": { "compile": [ "php bin/grav install", "php bin/gpm install admin -y", "php bin/gpm install awesome-theme-name-here -y" ] } [/prism]