Node & Redis Application Error on Heroku - node.js

Question

I am new on Heroku & Node so please bear with me. I deployed my working chatting app(on localhost) to Heroku but can't open the Heroku app.
Can anyone help me how to fix this issue?
I looked at some similar questions on stackoverflow and did heroku config:add REDISCLOUD_URL='redis_cloud_url' and heroku config:add NODE_ENV='production' but those didn't work.
Here is my heroku log.
2015-04-11T19:42:35.568690+00:00 heroku[api]: Deploy 0244dd7 by MYMAIL#gmail.com
2015-04-11T19:42:38.004491+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `node app.js`
2015-04-11T19:42:39.182617+00:00 app[web.1]: Detected 512 MB available memory, 512 MB limit per process (WEB_MEMORY)
2015-04-11T19:42:39.182639+00:00 app[web.1]: Recommending WEB_CONCURRENCY=1
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793252+00:00 app[web.1]: events.js:85
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793258+00:00 app[web.1]: throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793260+00:00 app[web.1]: ^
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793262+00:00 app[web.1]: Error: Redis connection to 127.0.0.1:6379 failed - connect ECONNREFUSED
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793264+00:00 app[web.1]: at RedisClient.on_error (/app/node_modules/redis/index.js:196:24)
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793266+00:00 app[web.1]: at Socket.<anonymous> (/app/node_modules/redis/index.js:106:14)
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793268+00:00 app[web.1]: at Socket.emit (events.js:107:17)
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793270+00:00 app[web.1]: at net.js:459:14
2015-04-11T19:42:39.793271+00:00 app[web.1]: at process._tickCallback (node.js:355:11)
2015-04-11T19:42:40.546881+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to crashed

Answer 1

Okay I know the problem actually, the issue is that you're using redis cloud, so redis is not running on 127.0.0.1
Have a look at the official documentation on Heroku; you must not set REDISCLOUD_URL to redis_cloud_url, you must let Heroku set it to your account's REDISCLOUD_URL, that you can get by doing this in your terminal
heroku config:get REDISCLOUD_URL
It should return something like this ;
http://rediscloud:password#hostname:port
If it returns something without this format then the addon is not properly configured / activated for your app.
And your code to connect to redis should look like this :
var redis = require('redis');
var url = require('url');
var redisURL = url.parse(process.env.REDISCLOUD_URL);
var client = redis.createClient(redisURL.port, redisURL.hostname, {no_ready_check: true});
client.auth(redisURL.auth.split(":")[1]);

Answer 2

I use Heroku Redis, not Redis To Go and also had such an issue. However I solved the issue by changing the way Redis client is initialized, previously I had following code:
const
redisOptions = require('./redisOptions'),
redis = require('redis'),
redisClient = redis.createClient(redisOptions);
now I removed url parameter from redisOptions and then add it to createClient method, i.e.:
const
redisOptions = require('./redisOptions'),
redis = require('redis'),
redisClient = redis.createClient(REDIS_URL, redisOptions);
then the error was fixed. Really not sure why it is working with no issues on my local environment but I need this fix on Heroku.