heroku-wordpress

My simple wordpress blogs run on heroku. Why? Because its free.

However, I recently got an e-mail from heroku informing me that I needed to upgrade from cedar-10 (based on ubuntu-10.04 LTS) to cedar-14 (based on ... ubuntu-14.04 LTS).

This seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and so I jumped in and executed the following as requested:

$ heroku stack:set cedar-14
$ git commit --allow-empty -m "Upgrading to Cedar-14"
$ git push heroku master

Result? A catastrophic failure for my blog. I had been using the heroku wordpress buildpack from mchung (https://github.com/mchung/heroku-buildpack-wordpress)
However, this statically links against libraries available in Ubuntu-10.04 and hence fails now that they have been upgraded.

The solution is actually fairly easy, and involves upgrading to a newer heroku-wordpress solution which uses a native php buildpack instead.

Follow (approximately) the following to upgrade your installation.

    cd $(YOUR_LOCAL_HEROKU_WORDPRESS)
    # Instruct heroku to upgrade to cedar-14
    heroku stack:set cedar-14
    # Force heroku to use the PHP buildpack
    heroku buildpacks:set https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php
    # Move your existing 'config' directory to save it for later
    mv config old-config
    # Add in the new reference repo
    git remote add xyu git://github.com/xyu/heroku-wp.git
    git fetch xyu
    git reset --hard xyu/master
    # Now - if you had extra plugins, you'll need to merge them in from 'oldconfig'
    cp -ar oldconfig/public/wp-content/{plugins,themes} public/wp-content
    git add public/wp-content
    git commit -m "Migrate original plugins and themes"
    # And finally - we need to update Heroku with our new install (note the -f on the end)
    git push heroku master -f

Now you should be able to open up your URL, and login. Its quite likely that as wordpress will have been updated, it will ask to update your database. But all of the components are the same - so with a little bit of luck - it should be a fairly transparent transition.