- Deploy a Rails app to a production server using Heroku
Deploying a Rails app (like all things in Rails) is simple and magical.
If your app is already using postgres all you have to do is add the 12factor gem to your Gemfile in the production group.
Anywhere in Gemfile
gem 'rails_12factor', group: :productionThis gem takes care of producing descriptive logs and serving your assets. Based on the recommended read: The Twelve-Factor App. Note that this class has covered many of these principles.
Once this is done you have to run bundle which will automatically update the Gemfile.lock, which must be done before you push to Heroku. Be sure to commit your changes before pushing.
If you haven't already, download the Heroku toolbelt, which is a commandline tool used to interact with your heroku instance.
First you need to create a heroku app (if you haven't already). This can be done in the command line inside your project directory.
heroku create YOUR_APP_NAME_HEREYou can test that this worked by running git remote -v and you should see a new remote for heroku. If not try again (pay attention to any error messages).
Once that is done we are ready to push our site to heroku. First, run git status to make sure you've added and commited all changes then we just push to the newly added heroku remote.
git push heroku master
(this will take a while to complete)
You can run any command on heroku by using heroku run followed by the command you want to execute. This will work for any command you'd normally run on your local development environment. This means that we can run rake db:migrate on the server.
migrate the database
heroku run rake db:migrate
You can also run db:reset or db:seed if you need to reset your database.
If your app depends on any environment variables (if you have a .env file) you'll need to set those values on Heroku.
To see the currently set environment values run
heroku config
To set a value run
heroku config:set TACO_KEY=xxxxxxx
Once the push finishes you can go to your website. If you run heroku open it will automatically load your web browser at the appropriate URL.
Once everything is set up all you have to do is run git push heroku master to push new changes to Heroku (always make sure your changes are commited with git status).
What if something goes wrong?
From your project directory you can run heroku logs to see the rails console output on heroku or heroku logs --tail to see a live feed.
You can also type herkou run rails c to access the rails console on the production server.