Rails: heroku

Deploying rails apps on Heroku

Next Steps if you want to deploy on Heroku

At whatever stage you are ready to deploy on Heroku, here’s what you need to do.

  1. Hopefully, if you were planning to use Heroku, you started with postgres right from the start. If not, converting to postgres now is the first thing you’ll need to do.

    • See: https://medium.com/@helenflam/how-to-change-your-rails-app-database-from-sqlite-to-postgresql-before-deploying-to-heroku-ae2acc25c7ac#.ytirsfz8c>, or this shorter version:
    • Edit Gemfile to remove gem 'sqlite3' and insert gem 'pg'
    • Run bundle install
    • Replace the config/database.yml file with appropriate values (See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6710654/change-from-sqlite-to-postgresql-in-a-fresh-rails-project
    • Use rake db:setup and rake db:migrate to set up the database.
    • Try rails server to see if app still works.
  2. Get the Heroku Toolbelt installed on your local system if possible.
    • If you are working in an academic computing environment (e.g. CSIL at UCSB, ACMS at UCSD), you’ll probably want to switch to using your own laptop or desktop machine, or a virtual machine where you have root access.
    • The reason is that in an academic computing environment where you don’t have root, (e.g. CSIL at UCSB, ACMS at UCSD) getting the Heroku toolbelt installed involves some nasty hacks, and may require more disk space than you have available (at least that was true as of Fall 2016. It may or may not be better now.)
    • Most things can be done without the heroku toolbelt, through the Heroku web interface. One exception is when you need to do a command such as “heroku exec …”, e.g. for database operations.

  3. Add a file named Procfile in the root of the directory, with the following contents:

    web: bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb

    This file is the one that tells Heroku “where to start” in our repository to run our application. It is the Heroku equivalent of running rails server. Commit this file to the repo.

  4. At the command line, type heroku login, then at the top line of the repo, type heroku create.

     Phills-MacBook-Pro:rails-app-practice3 pconrad$ heroku create
 Creating app... done, ⬢ pacific-sierra-80807
 https://pacific-sierra-80807.herokuapp.com/ | https://git.heroku.com/pacific-sierra-80807.git
 Phills-MacBook-Pro:rails-app-practice3 pconrad$

  5. After typing git push heroku master you can monitor the progress of the deploy by navigating to the heroku dashboard for the app, and navigating to the activity tab.