Bitwarden Setup

calendar Feb 10, 2022 · 3 min read · featured  ·
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Alright so lets get started. You will need a few prerequisites as follows:

  • Github Account.
  • Heroku Account. (this can be done with a free account but you need to be verify your free account.)
  • A Free service like Freshping. (or some other pingdom alternative to send continuous pings to the herko instance to keep it from sleeping.)

Deployment

Follow these steps:

  1. Fork this Repo on github.
  2. Edit the file the file in the code block below to enable/disable Duo Auth.
1.github/workflows/deploy.yml
2
3DUO_ENABLE: 1 or 0
  1. Go to your forked repo and click Settings > Secrets > Actions and add secrets for:
  • HEROKU_API_KEY
    Your Heroku API key - can be found in Account Setings -> APi Keys.
  • HEROKU_APP_NAME
    The name of the Heroku application, this must be unqiue across Heroku and will fail if it is not. [Value alphanumerical]
  • HEROKU_VERIFIED
    Required regardless, if you have added a credit card on, your account will be verified to use built in addons, if not please see "NON VERIFIED ACCOUNTS" section. [Value 0/1]

  1. In your Github repo page click on the actions tab and then click the BitwardenRSOnHerokuAIO_Deploy job and wait for it to complete.

  2. The job with run through github actions and deploy to your heroku account via the API info that you filled in earlier. This should take about 15 minutes and you can keep an eye on it through the output on the screen.

Update

Updating is simple and can be done one of two ways:

  • Running the workflow manually via Github Action.
  • Making a commit to the main branch, forcing a Github Actions workflow to initiate.

Either one of these will force the Github Actions workflow to run and update the app.

Optional

In order to keep the free heroku instance awake all the time, The free instance sleeps after like 15-30 minutes of inactiviy and then wakes again when it receives traffic but this means that the page takes longer to load and/or syncing might have issues, So we can use a service like UptimeRobot or FreshPing or really any other free Pingdom alternative to send a ping every 10 minutes to as a keep-alive. (you can even use something like uptimekuma self hosted in docker.)

  • sing up for free monitor service.
  • point service at your heroku bitwarden URL and set the time to 10 minutes.
  • Enjoy your new bitwarden instance.

In the next post we will discuss how to host this same Vaultwarden RS server at home with docker!


Credit and Special Thanks to David Howell for making the Github Actions and Repo/Readme to make this work in heroku for free.

So long and Thanks for all the fish!

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