My Science Is Better

Heroku on Ubuntu

As everything that comes from ruby world, getting heroku running on Ubuntu is not as easy as we're used to (ie: apt-get install heroku) so there are a few steps that need to be followed. I've written this down so i can come back to it later and so that others don't lose hours trying to figure this out. The data on this article has been scraped from http://www.web2linux.com/05/installing-rails-3-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx/ and http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart

Installing dependencies

sudo apt-get install curl git-core build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline5-dev

Install rvm

#for latest, check https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/
bash < 

Install ruby-1.9.2

rvm install 1.9.2 && rvm use 1.9.2 --default

Then add this line as the last line in your .bashrc:

if [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]];
        then source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm";
fi

Install Heroku

Sign-up for a Heroku account if you haven’t already and then install the herokugem.

gem install heroku

You will be asked to enter your Heroku credentials the first time you run a command; after the first time, your email address and an API token will be saved to ~/.heroku/credentials for future use.

It’s generally a good idea to add your public key immediately after installing the heroku gem so that you can use git to push or clone Heroku app repositories:

heroku keys:add
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: joe@example.com
Password:
Uploading ssh public key /Users/joe/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Track your application with Git

If you’re already using Git with your application, skip to the next step. If you’re not yet using Git to track your application, run this:

cd PATH/TO/MY_APP
git init
# Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
git add .
git commit -m "new app"
Created initial commit 5df2d09: new app
44 files changed, 8393 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Create your Heroku application

At the command line, run heroku create. The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to enter your Heroku credentials. Once you do, your email address and an API token will be saved to ~/.heroku/credentials, so you won’t have to provide them again.

This first use will also upload your public SSH key so you’ll be able to push and pull code.

heroku create
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: joe@example.com
Password:
Uploading ssh public key /Users/joe/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Created http://high-sunrise-58.heroku.com/ | git@heroku.com:high-sunrise-58.git
Git remote heroku added

The last line shows the name of your new Heroku app; in this case, it’s “high-sunrise-58”, and is available at http://high-sunrise-58.heroku.com. If you were to visit that URL before pushing your application code (either by typing it in or running heroku open), you’d see a standard Heroku welcome page.

On the next to last line, there’s another important piece of information: git@heroku.com:high-sunrise-58.git. This is the Git repository address for your new Heroku app, and if you check the output of git remote show heroku you can see that the heroku gem added it as a remote for you automatically.

Push your application to Heroku

git push heroku master
Counting objects: 65, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (58/58), done.
Writing objects: 100% (65/65), 80.54 KiB, done.
Total 65 (delta 14), reused 0 (delta 0)

-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Rails app detected
       Compiled slug size is 0.1MB
-----> Launching....... done
       App deployed to Heroku

To git@heroku.com:high-sunrise-58.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master

Bootstrap your database

Your app is now running on Heroku with an empty database. Depending on your framework, run the appropriate command to set up your DB. For Ruby on Rails, run:

heroku rake db:migrate
(in /mnt/home/slugs/41913_b81cc1e5813c58c443e4120aff984d006f36ef20/mnt)
== 20081118092504 CreateWidgets: migrating ====================================
-- create_table(:widgets)
   -> 0.0519s
== 20081118092504 CreateWidgets: migrated (0.0520s) ===========================

That’s it, your app is now running on Heroku! You can take a look at it in your default web browser by running heroku open.

Next Steps

Now that your application is running, it’s easy to push updates:

Develop and test changes locally.
Commit code to git.
Push your changes to Heroku with git push heroku.