Heroku tutorial should be removed

[GoogolGenius]

The new commit 0436db0 regarding a tutorial on using Heroku for hosting is a very bad idea.

These are some points that were sourced from communities of developers:

• Bots are not what the platform is designed for. Heroku is designed to provide web servers. This is why they give you a domain name and open a port on their local emulator.

• Heroku's environment is heavily containerized, making it significantly underpowered for a standard use case.

• Heroku's environment is volatile. In order to handle the insane amount of users trying to use it for their own applications, Heroku will dispose your environment every time your application dies unless you pay.

• Heroku has minimal system dependency control.

• Heroku only offers a limited amount of time on their free programme for your applications. If you exceed this limit, which you probably will, they'll shut down your application until your free credit resets.

Heroku may be fine for interaction based bots that only use HTTP REST (fitting the web server category), however the example shown seems to connect through the Gateway; this should at least be clarified. By having this tutorial to use Heroku hosting in the Discord API docs, it seems to beginners that Discord condones using Heroku, while later on they will eventually face issues with limitations and poor scalability for their bots.

[lol219]

You're right

[lsdimagine]

cc @shaydewael

[shaydewael]

Thanks for bringing this up and including concrete rationale. I think a lot of these points are good, and it makes sense to shift the sample and tutorial to use HTTP instead of Gateway. I'll spend some time next week soon going through the existing app and tutorial to rewrite and reframe it.

However, I don't want to or plan on removing the tutorial entirely. We've gotten indication that Heroku is really popular among Discord devs through surveys (and they'll use it regardless), so we want to keep a resource like this to make that process easier. While I understand what you mean, tutorials like this aren't meant to condone any specific hosting provider—they're just resources specific to Discord apps to help deploy to popular hosting providers. Perhaps there are ways we can make that more explicit in the docs or in the tutorials.

Also, there are concrete plans to add more hosting tutorials in the future (especially Azure and AWS). I think adding tutorials for a wider pool of hosting providers is also going to significantly help reduce any implicit recommendations.

[GoogolGenius]

I think this is a good idea going forward to have tutorials on various hosting providers. I just wanted to say that the particular example used was not suitable because of what Heroku is for; it sounds great that you are going to rewrite it for HTTP though 👍

[JustinBeckwith]

Best I can tell, we don't have this anymore. Regardless... sometimes we'll have tutorials for stuff not everyone loves. That's ok :) Closing this out.