Deploy Rails App on Heroku

Heroku is a cloud platform for hosting apps. It offers unlimited free container for easy app deployment. The down side is that the free app can only be active up to 18 hours per day. So it’s an ideal place for demo or small scale private apps.

Environment

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Ruby: ruby 2.3.0
Bundler: version 1.12.1
git: version 2.7.4

Preparation

Before we move on to next section, there are some prerequisites:

a Heroku account
Ruby installed (to be expanded)
Bundler installed (to be expanded)
git installed (to be expanded)

Set up

You need to download Heroku Toolbelt in order to use the Heroku Command Line Interface (CLI).

$ wget -O- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh

Once installed, run following command to login Heroku account

$ heroku login

Prepare the app

Create a new app:

$ rails new myapp --database=postgresql

Then move into you app directory:

$ cd myapp

If you already have an app created without specifying --database=postgresql, you have to convert the database to postgresql.

Note: If you just converted the database, you have to commit the changes so that Heroku will use the new database config:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "change database"

Deploy the app

Create an app on Heroku

$ heroku create myapp

When you create an app, a git remote (called heroku) is also created and associated with your local git repository.

You can verify that the remote was added to your project by running:

$ git config --list | grep heroku
remote.heroku.url=https://git.heroku.com/myapp.git
remote.heroku.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/heroku/*

Deploy your code:

$ git push heroku master

Migrate the database

If you are using the database in your application you need to manually migrate the database by running:

$ heroku run rake db:migrate

You can seed the database with the following command

$ heroku run rake db:seed

Any commands after the heroku run will be executed on a Heroku dyno.

Visit your application

Now the app is deployed and we can use the following command to open the website

$ heroku open

After Words

Check out more details on Heroku.

May 5, 2016