Just figured out how to hide APIs. Uploading through github, the API keys get flagged and disabled. Heroku has config vars on the setting page you can place, then modify your app.js by naming a constant variable and calling it in the js script. The mongohook used to be my API key, but now it doesn't live in the wild. Handy for security and fixed the mailchimp connection as they actually disabled my original API key. const mongohook = process.env.MONGO_VAR; mongoose.connect(mongohook, { useNewUrlParser: true });