Deployment to Heroku: Missing Shopify API Key

[Mat_Brummitt]

Hi all,

Incredibly frustrating, i'm following the Shopify docs for deploying an app to Heroku for an app which was scaffolded and build with the Shopify CLI.

I'm following these docs:

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/launch/deployment/deploy-web-app/deploy-to-heroku

And more generally for deploying to a hosting service:

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/launch/deployment/deploy-web-app/deploy-to-hosting-service

Initially the app would just crash immediately and a Heroku error would display. After reading other people's issues with this, it turned out to be that the docs don't actually tell you to set up a HOST env variable on Heroku.  Literally no mention of the HOST env variable whatsoever in the docs, so I added it via Heroku web admin, and suddenly the app no longer crashes! Hurray!

However, the current issue I have is that I now see a Shopify error as follows:

Additionally the logs show the following:

remote: Building the frontend app without an API key. The frontend build will not run without an API key. Set the SHOPIFY_API_KEY environment variable when running the build command.

I've followed the docs completely I just don't understand what to do at this point. How do I "Set the SHOPIFY_API_KEY environment variable when running the build command" when this is all supposed to be handled by the CLI's that are being used according to the docs?

Note: calling "shopify app env show" returns the expected environment variables and values.

Thanks for any advice

Mat

[sherpabot · Accepted solution]

Did you set the variables in your heroku app via the CLI or the dashboard > settings > config vars? 

 

heroku config:set -a <my-app-name> \
    SHOPIFY_APP_URL=https://<app-container>.herokuapp.com \
    SHOPIFY_API_KEY=<SHOPIFY_API_KEY> \
    SHOPIFY_API_SECRET=<SHOPIFY_API_SECRET> \
    SCOPES=<SCOPES>

in your heroku tml file you can also add it there:

build:
  docker:
    web: Dockerfile
  config:
    SHOPIFY_API_KEY: <SHOPIFY_API_KEY>

[Mat_Brummitt]

Thank you, thank you thank you!!!

It was updating the heroku.yml file that made it work for me:

config:
    SHOPIFY_API_KEY: <SHOPIFY_API_KEY>

I can't understand why this isn't documented on the page which describes how to deploy to Heroku!

Anyway thanks so much again, it's amazing to finally see my app hosted in a production environment and ready for deployment after so much hard work!

Mat