Deploying to Heroku

Set Up Heroku

For your convenience, here are instructions for deploying your app to Heroku. Heroku provides low cost, easily configured Rails application hosting.

To deploy this app to Heroku, you must have a Heroku account. If you need to obtain one, visit http://heroku.com/ to set up an account.

Make sure the Heroku gem is in your Gemfile (check rubygems.org for the latest heroku gem):

gem "heroku", ">= 1.19.1"

If it’s not, add it and run

$ bundle install

to set up your gems again.

Add your public key immediately after installing the heroku gem so that you can use git to push or clone Heroku app repositories. See http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-command for details.

Create Your Application on Heroku

Use the Heroku create command to create and name your new app.

$ heroku create _myapp_

As of 9 February 2011, bamboo-ree-1.8.7 is the default stack for new Heroku apps.

If you want to use Ruby 1.9.2, you can create your app with:

heroku create _myapp_ --stack bamboo-mri-1.9.2

Heroku Add-on for MongoHQ

You can use a Heroku add-on to deploy your app using the MongoHQ service. See details about the service and details about installation.

To enable the add-on, you can use the Heroku web interface or you can enter the following commands:

$ heroku addons:add mongohq:free

Check Heroku Configuration

You can check that everything has been added correctly by running:

$ heroku info --app myapp

If you see Stack: bamboo-ree-1.8.7 and you want to use Ruby 1.9.2, you can migrate:

heroku stack:migrate bamboo-mri-1.9.2

Push Your Application to Heroku

Push your application to Heroku:

$ git push heroku master

Initialize your application database:

$ heroku rake db:seed

Fix Problems Connecting to MongoHQ

If you get the error message “failed to connect to any given host:port” or “Failed to connect to a master node at localhost:27017”, the config/mongoid.yml file may not have the correct MongoHQ connection parameters.

If the file config/mongoid.yml contains this:

# set these environment variables on your prod server
production:
  host: <%= ENV['MONGOID_HOST'] %>
  port: <%= ENV['MONGOID_PORT'] %>
  username: <%= ENV['MONGOID_USERNAME'] %>
  password: <%= ENV['MONGOID_PASSWORD'] %>
  database: <%= ENV['MONGOID_DATABASE'] %>

modify it to look like this:

# set these environment variables on your prod server
production:
  uri: <%= ENV['MONGOHQ_URL'] %>

Then push your application to Heroku again with $ git push heroku master and run $ heroku rake db:seed again.

Visit Your Site

Open your Heroku site in your default web browser:

$ heroku open

Troubleshooting

If you get errors, you can troubleshoot by reviewing the log files:

$ heroku logs