Quickstart

Starting your own version of StartHereCMS can be done in 30 minutes. Once you have your Heroku and AWS accounts set up it’s as simple as clicking a button!

How to start a new website

There are a couple of services you need to sign up for before deploying your website to Heroku:

1. A Heroku account
2. An Amazon Web Services account

Once you sign up for these services you need the following keys to launch your application:

Required keys to create the website

Name of key	How to find it	Example value
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	Find your access key	KUDFHGJKHRUFDBF
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Create a secret key	2IUGFD/8vD9/k7s6
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME	Create your bucket	start-here-dog-files

Additionally there are some optional (free!) services you can use for added functionality:

• Google Analytics – used to track how people use your website
• Google Maps – used to let you set locations of community organizations on a map
• Algolia – used to power a search box on your website so people can easily find pages

Optional keys for additional services

Name of key	How to find it	Example value
GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY	Get your API key	AIv80f_8tueriogjURGYE
GOOGLE_WIDGET_DEFAULT_LAT	Find your latitude	37.773972
GOOGLE_WIDGET_DEFAULT_LONG	Find your longitude	-122.431297
ALGOLIA_APP_ID	Get your App Id	Q87VFIUEH
ALGOLIA_API_KEY	Get your API Key	ce0896nbfsHUGfdgrz9b

Once you have a Heroku account and an AWS bucket set up, you can start! Click the deploy button to create your project in Heroku:

This will prompt you to create an admin username + password. Remember what you type! We will use this account information to login later. Viewing your app after Heroku builds it should show a simple “Hello World” website like this:

Need a template to help you get started? Pick from our community sourced list.

Want a full walk through on how to structure and setup your website from scratch? Follow our Tutorial!