Heroku was built to be managed from its command-line interface. The better we learn it, the faster and more effective we will be in administering our application. The goal of this chapter is to get comfortable with using the CLI. We'll see that each Heroku command follows a common pattern. Once we learn a few of these commands, the rest will be relatively simple to master.

In this chapter, we won't cover every command available in the CLI, but we will focus on the ones that we'll be using the most. As we learn each command, we will also learn a little more about what is happening behind the scenes so that we get a better understanding of how Heroku works. The more we understand, the more we'll be able to take advantage of the platform.

Before we start, let's note that if we ever need to get a list of the available commands, we can run the following command:

$ heroku help

We can also quickly display the documentation for a single command:

$ heroku help command_name