Use case

You want to develop a website called artisanalraisinbeer.com using Django deployed on Heroku. You write a little bit of Django code and create a new Heroku app called artisanalraisinbeer to deploy to.

While developing, you can visit your site by going to this URL: http://artisanalraisinbeer.herokuapp.com

Eventually, you finish the first version of your website, buy the domain name artisanalraisinbeer.com, and set everything up so that you can view the site just by going to the following URL: http://www.artisanalraisinbeer.com

You can still visit http://artisanalraisinbeer.herokuapp.com, which is fine—but there’s one problem: you want your main site to show up in search results, not your .herokuapp.com site.

How it works

This app goes about this two ways: robots.txt and the X-Robots-Tag. Why both? To be double-plus sure… :eyes:

If herokuapp seems to be in the originating host of the user request, then we do two things:

• Put the following in robots.txt:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

• Set X-Robots-Tag in our response header to noindex, nofollow.

For search engines that respect these settings, they should start to ignore these sites in future crawls.

Quick start

1. Add 'hide_herokuapp' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

2. Add the HideHerokuappFromRobotsMiddleware middleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES like this:

   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
       ...
       'hide_herokuapp.middleware.HideHerokuappFromRobotsMiddleware',
   )

3. Include the hide_herokuapp URLs in your project’s urls.py like this:

   urlpatterns = [
      ...
      url(r'^', include('hide_herokuapp.urls')),
      ...
   ]

   alternatively, you may hook up the view directly:

   from hide_herokuapp.views import herokuapp_robots_view
   
   urlpatterns = [
     ...
     url(r'^robots\.txt$', herokuapp_robots_view),
     ...
   ]

Contribute

PyPI (Downloads)

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-hide-herokuapp

Official repository

https://github.com/isms/django-hide-herokuapp

Issue tracker

https://github.com/isms/django-hide-herokuapp/issues