Rails on Heroku

Heroku is a great tool to deploy your applications to the cloud. Heroku is free for small applications, and scales up very easily. It also removes a lot of the hassles of production configuration and deployment so you can get in there and code.

Prerequisites

• You must have a Heroku account.
• You’ll need an initialized git repo for your app.
• Your app will need to have the pg and heroku gems installed.

Create App, Add Remote, Push Code

Replace “appname” in the following examples with the name of your application, or some other mnemonic placeholder.

1. $ heroku apps:create appname –stack cedar
2. $ git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:appname.git
3. $ git push heroku

Done!

Troubleshooting

• If you run into any issues, make sure the Heroku gem is configured with your credentials.
• Pay close attention to the output when you try to git push heroku, it’ll give you the play-by-play of each step in the deployment process.
• Check heroku logs to see what the errors are if you’re getting 500s when you try to access your application in production. I use heroku logs -f to watch logged information in real-time as it comes in (hit control-c to stop).

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