That's a fair bit more involved than "FTP files to my web host and they usually just work"

It's actually easier...

  $ git push heroku master

You can't have 'git' and 'easier' on the same phrase

Or maybe you can: Hg is easier than Git

Now, I don't hate git, I love git, but you're seriously overestimating the knowledge of most of the programmers.

Git for lots of people feels like being thrown in a plane cockpit and asked to fly the darn thing.

And this is seriously something Heroku needs to think about. Sure, for now, it's still mostly early adopters.

But I really wouldn't like to tie my production servers to a specific VCS.

Compare this with drag-and-drop of php files to their ftp server.

Sure, well I would hope it's easy to do a one line deploy to any platform and with any language... once you set it up. You left out freezing requirements for pip, setting up cedar, etc. Nothing like that for a simple PHP app.

I don't want to overstate the case; deploying Flask isn't hard, but deploying PHP is stupidly easy.

That is obviously not sufficent. For using PHP I literally have to tell people to open an ftp GUI client and drag+drop a folder, or do something like:

    sftp -r website user@host:

So, what is the full "this is how you use heroku" I can send to a windows user, who knows HTML and wants to just get started with 'hello world'.

See the Heroku Quickstart: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart

Essentially you sign up for a Heroku account (https://api.heroku.com/signup), and set up the Heroku "toolbelt" (https://toolbelt.heroku.com).

Once that's done, you can run this bash script (https://gist.github.com/2622850) to create and deploy a "hello world" Flask app on Heroku:

  $ heroku login
  $ bash setup.sh helloworld
  $ cd helloworld
  $ git push heroku master

It should return a live Web URL for your app:

  http://strong-stream-5848.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku

See the Heroku Python tutorial (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python) for details.

Compared to deploying Hello World in PHP, that's a lot of work.

And compared to putting down the window in my car, turning on the AC is a lot of work. Two buttons and a dial compared to just one button.

One is clearly superior to the other though and anyone going near a car should have zero difficulty with either...

I guess that's true, but you know... so what? Can't we worry more about building something cool than about shaving seconds off the one-time setup cost involved with sharing that cool thing with the world?

As a Mercurial user who doesn't feel like learning git just for the sake of deploying toy Python apps, can anyone comment on whether hg-git or the like is a reasonable way of deploying to heroku?

It would add a bit of overhead, but you can certainly have mercurial at the center of your workflow via gh-git, yes.

Of course, this assumes you are using Git in the first place, or are willing to learn it. Most folks already have FTP/ssh down pat, so git is a big jump from just copying files.

There is also Google App Engine, the free tier is fairly generous as well.