Heroku + node.js error (Web process failed to bind to $PORT within 60 seconds of launch)

I have my first node.js app (runs fine locally) - but I am unable to deploy it via heroku (first time w/ heroku as well). The code is below. SO doesn't let me write so much code, so I would just say that the running the code locally as well within my network shows no issue.

 var http = require('http');
 var fs = require('fs');
 var path = require('path');

 http.createServer(function (request, response) {

    console.log('request starting for ');
    console.log(request);

    var filePath = '.' + request.url;
    if (filePath == './')
        filePath = './index.html';

    console.log(filePath);
    var extname = path.extname(filePath);
    var contentType = 'text/html';
    switch (extname) {
        case '.js':
            contentType = 'text/javascript';
            break;
        case '.css':
            contentType = 'text/css';
            break;
    }

    path.exists(filePath, function(exists) {

        if (exists) {
            fs.readFile(filePath, function(error, content) {
                if (error) {
                    response.writeHead(500);
                    response.end();
                }
                else {
                    response.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': contentType });
                    response.end(content, 'utf-8');
                }
            });
        }
        else {
            response.writeHead(404);
            response.end();
        }
    });

 }).listen(5000);

 console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:5000/');

Any idea ?

Heroku dynamically assigns your app a port, so you can't set the port to a fixed number. Heroku adds the port to the env, so you can pull it from there. Switch your listen to this:

.listen(process.env.PORT || 5000)

That way it'll still listen to port 5000 when you test locally, but it will also work on Heroku.

You can check out the Heroku docs on Node.js here.

It's worth mentioning that if your code doesn't specify a port, then it shouldn't be a web process and probably should be a worker process instead.

So, change your Procfile to read (with your specific command filled in):

worker: YOUR_COMMAND

and then also run on CLI:

heroku scale worker=1