I migrated 12 client projects off Heroku. Here's the playbook (and the 7 things that bit me every single time).

Short summary

A senior backend engineer shares a battle-tested 8-step playbook for migrating Heroku apps to Render, Railway, Fly.io, or self-hosted alternatives. Each step has specific gotchas—most critically, the heroku_ext schema and sslmode=require that silently break production. The post covers 7 migration killers from 12 real projects with exact CLI commands and verification steps.

• •Step-by-step Heroku migration playbook proven across 12 projects
• •7 critical gotchas (heroku_ext schema, DATABASE_URL sslmode, etc.) that cause silent failures
• •Covers all platforms: Render, Railway, Fly.io, HostingGuru, AWS/GCP, VPS with platform-agnostic steps

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.