Sign up for a Heroku account and install the toolbelt if you haven't already.
In your Gemfile, add
group :production do
gem 'pg'
gem 'rails_12factor'
end
and replace
gem 'sqlite3'
with
group :development do
gem 'sqlite3'
end
Next, from the command line,
bundle install --without production
Finally, commit these changes using the Desktop App or from the command line:
git add -A
git commit -m "Heroku changes"
From the command line,
heroku create your-app-name-here
If the name is available, you will get a URL of http://your-app-name-here.herokuapp.com. If not, try again.
From the command line,
git push heroku master
It may take a while for Heroku to receive your code, detect that it is a Rails application, bundle install, and deploy. Once finished you should be able to visit your site with the shorcut
heroku open
Every time you are ready to deploy a new version of your app, you need to again do
git push heroku master
to send your latest commits to Heroku. You can continue using GitHub to store and colloborate on your code just the same as before; you just have two destinations now to send your code to instead of one.
You still need to migrate your database and other setup tasks. Prefix any commands that you want to run on your Heroku machine with heroku run. For example,
heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku run rake db:seed
heroku run rails c
Note: if you used a column type of
belongs_towhen generating scaffolds with foreign key columns, AND you used a non-conventional name for them, you will need to modify your migration files. TODO complete this.
In-browser error messages are not descriptive while in production mode, since you don't want to scare users.
To see error messages for your production server,
heroku logs --tail
This gives you a view into your production server log.
You can use your own custom domain for your Heroku app. You will first need to purchase a domain from a provider like Google Domains.