How do I publish a student website?
When a student is working on a problem on Grok and they’ve decided they want to share it, all they have to do is click Publish and we’ll take their code and send it to Heroku.
What is publishing?
Joining Heroku
Linking your account
Publishing your website
What is publishing?
To make it easier to get your websites up on the internet we've created a one click publishing process. This process takes the code you've written for a problem on Grok, bundles it up and sends it over to Heroku so that anyone on the internet can see it.
Publishing to Heroku requires you to first set up a Heroku account and then link that account with Grok Learning. Once linked we will be able to create apps (a website) and upload builds (a version of that website) for you. Once uploaded you'll have a URL with your website on the internet.
Publishing is just a bonus, it is not related to marking.
Please note Grok Learning is not affiliated with or otherwise sponsored by Heroku or Salesforce.
Joining Heroku
Heroku is a service that makes it easy to host websites and web applications. In the past hosting a website would often require you to rent a server, install appropriate software on the server, configure it and maintain it. With Heroku you could host a full python web app, with a database, background workers and even websockets without much effort at all. There's much more information about Heroku on their "What is Heroku?" page.
Before signing up to Heroku make sure you read over their Terms of Service. Importantly Heroku does not allow accounts by children under the age of 13.
To create an account on Heroku go to their homepage and click Sign Up or Sign Up For Free. Then follow their instructions to fill in your details, create an account and confirm your email address.
Because Heroku is a business aimed at real world developers it does provide many services for a cost. Using Heroku for free does not require a credit card, but many of their extra features do, including adding more than five apps. Please carefully read over their pricing page before adding a credit card as you may incur charges.
Linking Your Account
Once you've created your Heroku account you're ready to link it with Grok. Problems that support publishing will have a Publish button.
Click that Publish button to open the publishing information modal window (you might have seen this before). Next up you'll need to click on Link With Heroku.
Once you've done that you'll be presented with a window from Heroku asking for your permission to give Grok access to your account. Click Allow to give us access. You'll only ever have to do this once.
Publishing Your Website
Okay! Now that you're all set up it's quite straightforward to publish something. The first time, when your account is authorised, it'll start the publishing process automatically. Every other time click the Publish button to start the upload.
While uploading you'll see a spinning cog . This could take several minutes to finish depending on the number of files you have in your website. Once finished you'll see a popover with a link to view your website.
Click View to check out your website!
If you're seeing errors, something isn't behaving as you expect or you have further questions feel free to contact support@groklearning.com.