Recently, I deployed a client project to Heroku, using the Heroku instance as an internal demo server. The project is based on Ruby 2.0 and Rails 4. I was surprised to find that the deployment to Heroku is not as smooth as it was before.
Here are the tricks and tips I learned to help you overcome the learning curve and get your Rails 4 apps deployed to Heroku.
Rails 4 Specific Tricks
- Heroku forces you to specify your ruby version in Gemfile, it’s supported by bundler from 1.2 version, so just add below line into your Gemfile:
#specify ruby version to enable the deploy to Heroku instance. ruby '2.0.0' Rails4 gets rid of plugin system. In order to use features such as static asset serving and logging on Heroku, you should add the following gems to your Gemfile:
gem 'rails_log_stdout', github: 'Heroku/rails_log_stdout' gem 'rails3_serve_static_assets', github: 'Heroku/rails3_serve_static_assets' Use puma as the web server, you want to add a Procfile file and add below line in it:
web: bundle exec puma -p $PORT Below http basic auth doesn’t work as what I did before for non-rails4 app on Heroku.
config.middleware.insert_after(::Rack::Lock, "::Rack::Auth::Basic", "Production") do |u, p| [u, p] == [USER, PASSWORD] end # Error message when pushing to Heroku... -----> Preparing app for Rails asset pipeline Running: rake assets:precompile rake aborted! No such middleware to insert after: Rack::Lock Actually, Rails 4 is thread safe by default, you do not have the overhead of including the Rack::Lock middleware in each request. So just use Rack::Auth::Basic directly as there is no Rack::Lock middleware any more when you using a web server such as puma:
config.middleware.use '::Rack::Auth::Basic' do |u, p| [u, p] == [USER, PASSWORD] end Heroku Related Tips
In my case, I need to transfer PG database between local and Heroku. Firstly, I need to find the URL to my db on Heroku:
$ heroku config:get DATABASE_URL postgres://bla:sth@ec2-17-21-12-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/123 Then transfer from the Heroku db to your local db (switch -t to and -f from versus):
$ heroku plugins:install https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-pg-transfer $ heroku pg:transfer -t postgres://localhost/dbname -f postgres://bla:sth@ec2-17-21-12-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/123 Since the heroku-pg-transfer tool utilizes postgres’s native pg_dump facility it is a much more predictable and resilient tool. Check out a related blog for more details.
There is another needs in my case, I have to deploy development branch to Heroku, but Heroku default is to deploy master branch to their instance, use below command to specify a branch for deployment.
# deploy a specific branch to Heroku git push heroku other-barnch:master Resources
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails4
http://blog.remarkablelabs.com/2012/12/rails-4-is-thread-safe-by-default-rails-4-countdown-to-2013
