ASIDE.IO New Instance

Hosting Your Own Instance of ASIDE

It's now possible to spin up your own instance of ASIDE in just a few steps. Follow the guide below to deploy a new version of the app and then configure the OAuth login.

Prerequisites

Before you can setup a new instance of ASIDE you're going to need a couple things:

Deploy the Heroku Application

Click the button below to begin the deployment process for ASIDE. It will open a new page which contains a form with a couple fields relating to the deployment.


Fill out the App name field. The App name will dictate what the URL is to access the application. For example, if the App name is "my-aside" then the URL is "https://my-aside.herokuapp.com". Click the Deploy app button.

Create the Connected App

From within Salesforce (and in the Lightning Experience UI), go to the setup menu. Type App Manager in the Quick Find search, and click the App Manager setup item. In the top right of the screen, you should see a button, New Connected App. Click the button to begin creating the Connected App.

From the New Connected App screen, populate the first three required fields (Connected App Name, API Name, Contact Email); their values are not important. Scroll down to the "API (Enable OAuth Settings)" section and check the Enable OAuth Settings checkbox. A handful of additional fields should now be displaying in this section.

Populate the required field Callback URL with the URL to the instance of ASIDE you just deployed with "/auth" added to the end. For example, if your new instance of ASIDE is available at "https://my-aside.herokuapp.com" then the Callback URL is "https://my-aside.herokuapp.com/auth".

The last field you have to fill out to finish configuring the Connected App is the Selected OAuth Scopes field. Choose a value of "Full access (full)" and click the save button to finish configuring the Connected App.

Now that you have created a Connected App it has two fields which are populated by Salesforce on it's detail page: Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. Their values will be used to finish configuring the application in the next step.

Add the Heroku Config Vars

As a final step, you will need to populate the Config Vars within Heroku in order for ASIDE's OAuth based login to work. When logged into Heroku and viewing the application dashboard for the Heroku app you deployed earlier, click the Settings tab. Within the Config Vars section click Reveal Config Vars. Add the three new Config Vars detailed below.
After adding these three Config Vars you should be able to login to your new instance of ASIDE.

All Done!

You have now deployed your own copy of ASIDE and configured OAuth to work. Your copy of ASIDE should be fully operational at this point. If you still can't login, wait 10 minutes. The Connected App can sometimes take a bit to be available for use. Thanks for using ASIDE!

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some questions that might be on your mind after reading through this guide:
Why can't I login?
It takes a while for for the Connected App to be available for use sometimes. Wait 10 minutes and try again. If that doesn't work, double check your configuration. If that doesn't work, read the help for more info on login failures.
Is this really free?
It's free as described in this guide. By default the application will be configured to use the Heroku free tier. To obtain more performance to host more users you may need to leave the free tier.
How do I setup SSL?
You can read more info about that here.
How do I setup a custom domain?
Heroku has a knowledge article about this topic here.
Will my version of the application automatically update when the associated git repository is updated?
Not by default. However, you can configure the app in Heroku (from the Settings tab in the Heroku application dashboard) to be directly connected to ASIDE's git repository and then enable automatic deploys to accomplish this.
Can you tell me more about how the login for ASIDE works?
It uses the OAuth web server flow. Salesforce has documentation on it here.
Does the Connected App really need an OAuth Scope of Full?
Probably not, but it's safest to leave it at that setting. The definition of full access changes over time as Salesforce obtains new capabilities and permissions to go along with those capabilities. When ASIDE was originally created it needed full access but it probably does not need that much access now (e.g. looking at the scope list, it probably does not need access to wave and eclair data).
Is there an easy way to hook up ASIDE to google analytics?
Indeed there is! Within the heroku config vars setup add a fourth key, its name should be GID and its value should be your google analytics tracking id.
How does the posi-trac rear end on a Plymouth work?
It just does.