Heroku-18 Stack
Last updated July 11, 2025
Table of Contents
The Heroku-18 stack reached end-of-life on April 30th, 2023. Upgrade to a newer stack as soon as possible. See the Heroku-18 End-Of-Life FAQ for more details.
This article describes the Heroku-18 stack, based on Ubuntu 18.04. What is a stack?
What’s new
This stack is now based on Ubuntu 18.04, compared to Ubuntu 16.04 used in the Heroku-16 stack.
Package installations were performed using apt-get‘s --no-install-recommends option, which removed many unneeded packages mostly related to the X11 windowing system and Tcl/Tk that were present in previous stacks, resulting in a smaller base image size. The Ubuntu Packages on Heroku article lists all package additions, changes and removals compared to previous stacks.
Available software
Every stack on Heroku supports different operating system packages and language runtime versions. This support is typically confined to software that was still actively developed by the respective maintainers at the time the stack was first released.
Language runtimes
For the most accurate information on supported language runtime versions, please check the individual language pages:
| Buildpack | Shorthand | Runtime versions |
|---|---|---|
| Ruby | heroku/ruby |
Runtime versions |
| Node.js | heroku/nodejs |
Runtime versions |
| Python | heroku/python |
Runtime versions |
| Java | heroku/java |
Runtime versions |
| PHP | heroku/php |
Runtime versions |
| Go | heroku/go |
Runtime versions |
Operating system packages
For a full list of operating system packages available on Heroku-18, please refer to article Ubuntu Packages on Heroku Stacks.
Support period
Heroku-18 is based upon Ubuntu 18.04, and so reached end-of-life on April 30th, 2023. See the Heroku-18 End-Of-Life FAQ for more details.
Using Heroku-18
It is no longer possible to create new Heroku-18 apps, or to switch an existing app’s stack to Heroku-18. Please use a supported stack instead.
Upgrading to Heroku-18
Please refer to the stack upgrading guide to understand the procedures to follow when upgrading to a new stack.
We recommend that you monitor your application closely after migrating an app to the new stack to ensure it’s performing correctly.
Heroku-18 Docker image
Heroku-18 is available as two Docker images:
- The runtime image (
heroku/heroku:18), which is recommended over the build image for most workloads. - The build image (
heroku/heroku:18-build), which is larger as it includes development headers and toolchains. It is only recommended for customers that need to compile source code or dependencies.
Use the following command in your Dockerfile to use Heroku-18 as your base image:
FROM heroku/heroku:18
To learn more about deploying Docker images, please refer to the Heroku Container Registry and Runtime documentation.