How to deploy to Heroku for the first time
Published 2011-02-23Heroku 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