I think I figured this out after trying to run it locally,
The Heroku install steps say to add the follow dependencies to you package.json:
"dependencies": {
...
"nodebb-plugin-dbsearch": "0.0.10",
"redis": "~0.10.1",
"connect-redis": "~2.0.0"
},
"devDependencies": {
But looking closer, nodebb-plugin-dbsearch is already in the package.json at a higher version. This conflict seemed to cause the crash.
I am guessing that recent versions of nodeBB have changed so this part of the doc is no longer applicable. Here is a pull request to adjust the docs, if I am correct in this assumption:
https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-english/pull/51
