Upload a preview

    If you don’t own parcels in Decentraland or are not ready to deploy your scene to Decentraland, you can upload your scene preview to run as an app in a free server.

    Once uploaded, the only thing that others have to do to explore your scene is follow a link. They don’t need to install the CLI, Node, NPM, or any of the other tools that would be required to run the preview on their local machine.

    Note that it’s not necessary to own LAND to upload a scene preview to a Heroku server. The uploaded content isn’t linked to the blockchain in any way. When running the preview, other adjacent parcels appear as empty.

    Follow the steps below to upload your scenes to a free Heroku server:

    1. Make sure you have the latest Decentralnd CLI version installed on your machine npm i -g decentraland@latest.

    2. Create a free Heroku account, if you don’t already have one.

    3. Install the Heroku CLI. Do this via npm i -g heroku, or see their documentation for alternatives.

    4. Create a git repository for your project. Use any tool you prefer for this, like GitHub desktop. To use git from the command line:

      a) Create a new repository by running git init in the project folder at root level

      b) Do git add . and git commit -m 'your commit text

      c) Set the current branch to main via git branch -m master main

      d) Make sure the .gitignore file contains the following:

      /node_modules
npm-debug.log
.DS_Store
/*.env
bin

      Note: Make sure your Decentraland project uses the latest SDK version, do npm i decentraland-ecs@latest. Projects uploaded to Heroku or similar platformas and built with versions older than 6.10.0 will not be supported and will not be allowed to fech avatar data from content servers.

      Note: If you’re deploying a project that was created using dcl init, you would need to remove the line "yarn": "please use npm" from your package.json file otherwise you’re going to get an error while deploying.

    5. Use the Heroku CLI to log into your Heroku account with heroku login. This opens a browser window to provide your user and password.

    6. Create a new Heroku application and give it a unique name. In the Heroku site do that via New > Create new App. Otherwise, in the Heroku CLI do it via heroku create -a example-dcl-scene

    7. Link your Decentraland project to your Heroku application. On the project folder run heroku git:remote -a example-dcl-scene (using the name you created you heroku application with)

    8. Edit package.json in your scene to change the start script to CI=true dcl start -p ${PORT:=8000}

    9. Explicitly install the Decentraland CLI as a dependency of your project, running npm i --save decentraland

    10. Deploy your scene preview with git push heroku main

    11. To access the scene, copy the link shared by the Heroku deploy command. Then manually add the following parameters to the URL ?realm=localhost-stub&renderer-branch=master.

      For example if the link shared by Heroku is https://example-dcl-scene.herokuapp.com, the link you should enter is https://example-dcl-scene.herokuapp.com/?realm=localhost-stub&renderer-branch=master.

      If your scene is not in coordinates 0,0, you should also include these as part of the URL. For example: https://example-dcl-scene.herokuapp.com/?realm=localhost-stub&renderer-branch=master&position=50,-10

    Every time you make changes to your scene, make sure you:

    • Commit and push your changes to the git repo
    • Push the new version to the Heroku app git push heroku main

    You can read the console logs of the scene preview by running heroku logs --tail