Dan Stutzman

How to deploy to Heroku for the first time

Heroku is a great way to host your Ruby on Rails web app for free.  The following steps walk you through the process of signing up for an account, creating a Rails app, and deploying to Heroku.  I'll assume you're starting with a vanilla Ubuntu 10.04 install; if not, you can skip any steps you've already done.

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev rubygems libopenssl-ruby rails git-core
• ssh-keygen -t rsa # keep hitting Enter to accept the defaults
• sudo gem install heroku
• add to ~/.bashrc:

  export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin

• . ~/.bashrc # load the new PATH
• rails myrailsapp
• cd myrailsapp
• git init
• git add .
• git commit -m "my new app"
• Sign up for heroku account at https://api.heroku.com/signup, get email, click on link in email
• heroku create myrailsapp637 # change the name as needed
• heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• git push heroku master
• vi public/index.html, add some new text before the </body> tag

The Rails app should now be available at myrailsapp637.heroku.com or wherever you deployed it.  For future deployments you can repeat the following steps:

• Make changes to files as needed; for example, add some text directly before the </body> tag to public/index.html
• git commit -a # comment about the change
• git push heroku master
• Changes should now be visible at myrailsapp637.heroku.com or wherever you deployed to