Build Well-Documented and Authenticated APIs in Node.js with Fastify

engineering , Principal Developer Advocate

If you’re an API developer working with Node.js, then you’re probably familiar with Express. But have you tried out the Fastify framework to build with power, speed, and convenience? In this walkthrough, we build a full-featured, easy-to-consume API with Fastify. And we deploy it to the cloud with ease. We show you how to:

  • Get started working with Fastify to build an API
  • Implement API authentication by using a JSON web token (JWT)
  • Use Fastify’s Swagger plugins to generate an OpenAPI specification
  • Consume the OpenAPI specification with Postman, giving you an API client that can send requests seamlessly to your back-end API
  • Deploy your application to Heroku

Improved Browser Testing on Heroku with Chrome

engineering , Software Engineering Architect

For developers and businesses offering a web-based product, automated browser testing is a critical tool to ensure continuous delivery of a reliable service. Developers write browser tests by scripting actions against a real browser, simulating real usage by navigating, selecting, and making assertions about web pages and their document elements.

In this post, we introduce a new community buildpack that helps with automated browser testing. The new buildpack resolves installation reliability problems in the existing Chrome browser buildpacks for Heroku apps.


Building a GPT Backed by a Heroku-Deployed API

engineering , Principal Developer Advocate

How to connect your GPT on OpenAI to a backend Node.js app

Late in 2023, OpenAI introduced GPTs, a way for developers to build customized versions of ChatGPT that can bundle in specialized knowledge, follow preset instructions, or perform actions like reaching out to external APIs. As more and more businesses and individuals use ChatGPT, developers are racing to build powerful GPTs to ride the wave of ChatGPT adoption.


Working with ChatGPT Functions on Heroku

engineering , Principal Developer Advocate

How to Build and Deploy a Node.js App That Uses OpenAI Functions

Near the end of 2023, ChatGPT announced that it had 100M weekly users. That’s a massive base of users who want to take advantage of the convenience and power of intelligent question answering with natural language.

ChatGPT Interface

With this level of popularity for ChatGPT, it’s no wonder that software developers are joining the ChatGPT app gold rush, building tools on top of OpenAI’s APIs. Building and deploying a GenAI-based app is quite easy to do—and we’re going to show you how!


Introducing pgvector for Heroku Postgres

Over the past few weeks, we worked on adding pgvector as an extension on Heroku Postgres. We're excited to release this feature, and based on the feedback on our public roadmap, many of you are too. We want to share a bit more about how you can use Postgres vector search and how it may be helpful to you.

All Standard-tier or higher databases running Postgres 15 now support storing vectors and vector search in Postgres. You can get started by running CREATE EXTENSION vector; in a client session. Postgres 15 has been the default version on Heroku Postgres since March 2023. If you're on an older version and want to use pgvector, upgrade to...


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