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Heroku CI Is Now Generally Available: Fast, Low Setup CI That’s Easy to Use

Today we are proud to announce that Heroku CI, a low-configuration test runner for unit and browser testing that is tightly integrated with Heroku Pipelines, is now in General Availability.

Tests@2x

To build software with optimal feature release speed and quality, continuous integration (CI) is a popular and best practice, and is an essential part of a complete continuous delivery (CD) practice. As we have done for builds, deployments, and CD, Heroku CI dramatically improves the ease, experience, and function of CI. Now your energy can go into your apps, not your process.

With today's addition of Heroku CI, Heroku now offers a complete CI/CD solution for developers in all of our officially supported languages: Node, Ruby, Java, Python, Go, Scala, PHP, and Clojure. As you would expect from Heroku, Heroku CI is simple, powerful, visual, and prescriptive. It is intended to provide the features and flexibility to be the complete CI solution for the vast majority of application development situations, serving use cases that range from small innovation teams, to large Enterprise projects.

Easy to Setup and Use

Setup@2x

Configuration of Heroku CI is quite low (or none). There is no IT involved; Heroku CI is automatically available and coordinated for all apps in Heroku Pipelines. Just turn on Heroku CI for the Pipeline, and each push to GitHub will run your tests. Tests reside in the location that is the norm typical for each supported language, for example: test scripts in Go typically reside in the file named "function_test.go". These tests are executed automatically on each git push. So no learning curve is involved, and little reconfiguration is typically necessary when migrating to Heroku CI from Jenkins and other CI systems.

For users who are also new to continuous delivery, we've made Heroku Pipelines set-up easier than ever with a straightforward 3-step setup that automatically creates and configures your review, development, staging, and production apps. All that's left is to click the "Tests" tab and turn on Heroku CI.

Visual at Every Stage

Pipeline@2x

From setup, to running tests, to CI management, everything about Heroku CI is intended to be fully visual and intuitive -- even for users who are new to continuous integration. For each app, the status of the latest or currently running test run is shown clearly on the Pipelines page. Test actions are a click away, and fully available via the UI: re-run any test, run new tests against an arbitrary branch, search previous tests by branch or pull request, and see full detail for any previous test. And Heroku CI integrates seamlessly with GitHub - on every git push your tests run, allowing you to also see the test result within GitHub web or GitHub Desktop interfaces.

CI users who want more granular control, direct debug access, and programmatic control of CI actions can use the CLI interface for Heroku CI.

Power, Speed, and Flexibility

For every test you run, Heroku CI creates and populates an ephemeral app environment that mirrors your Staging and Production environments. These CI apps are created automatically, and then destroyed immediately after test runs complete. All the add-ons, databases, and configurations your code requires are optimized for test speed, and parity with downstream environments. Over the beta period, we have been working with add-on partners to make sure the CI experience is fast and seamless.

Setup and tear-down for each CI run happens in seconds. Because we use these ephemeral Heroku apps to run your tests, there is no queue time (as is common with many CI systems). Your tests run immediately, every time on dedicated Performance dynos.

Across the thousands of participants in our public beta, most developers observed test runs completing significantly faster than expectations.

Cost-effective

We view CI as an essential part of effective development workflows, that is, part of good overall delivery process.

Each CI-enabled Heroku Pipeline is charged just $10/month for an unlimited number of test runs. For each test run, dyno charges apply only for the duration of tests. We recommend and default to Performance-M dynos to power test runs, and you can specify other dyno sizes.

Note that all charges are pro-rated per second, with no commitment, so you can try out Heroku CI for pennies -- usually with little modification to your existing test scripts.

Enterprise-ready

All Heroku Enterprise customers get unlimited CI-enabled Pipelines, and an unlimited number of test runs, all, of course, with zero queue time. No provisioning, authentication set-up, or management of CI is required for new projects, and Heroku CI can be turned on for any Heroku Pipeline with a single click.

Existing Heroku Enterprise dyno credits are automatically used for test runs, and invoices will contain a new section listing the CI-enabled Pipelines alongside the account-wide dyno usage for CI test runs.

All test run results are available at permanent URLs that can be referenced for compliance regimes, and all authentication is managed under existing Heroku Enterprise Teams (Org) security. Unification of security, authentication, billing between CI and production deployments, along with a prescriptive methodology across company projects, lets Enterprises innovate on Heroku with the agility of a start-up.

Heroku-built, Community-hardened

Some terms are not usually associated with CI systems: we think Heroku CI is among the most pleasant, beautiful software testing systems available -- and we have you to thank for this. More than 1500 beta users tested Heroku CI, surfacing bugs, offering suggestions; telling us that some webhooks got dropped, that an icon on the tab might be nice, that it should be more obvious how to re-run a test ... and roughly 600 other notes, many of which grew into e-mail conversations with you. As is the case with all software: we will still be perfecting. And we are pretty proud of what we have here. Thank you, and keep the comments coming!

Get Started

It's easy. Set-up a Heroku Pipeline and you're ready. There's even a two-minute video here and a simple how-to. Give it a spin, and let us know what you think.

Originally published: May 18, 2017

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