Should I Deploy My Ruby on Rails Application on Heroku

Should I deploy my Ruby on Rails application on Heroku

Yes, you should definitely deploy your application in heroku. To do this, this is what you will need to do:

Make sure you have git installed in your computer
Create a heroku account here
Install the heroku gem and do the rest as mentioned in this page
Track your application with git, and create your heroku application as shown here
After you do this, heroku will provide you with a URL for your application, such as http://blah-bleep-123.heroku.com. Now, the next step would be to associate your domain to this heroku URL.
Configure your domain DNS Server as shown in this page. Mind you, after you change your DNS, it might take upto 48 hours for it to work. You can change your domain DNS by logging into the site where you bought your domain, for e.g. godaddy.com, hostingdude.com, etc.

Add this code to your ApplicationController. You can follow this from this page as well

class ApplicationController
  before_filter :ensure_domain

  APP_DOMAIN = 'www.mydomain.com'

  def ensure_domain
    if request.env['HTTP_HOST'] != APP_DOMAIN
      # HTTP 301 is a "permanent" redirect
      redirect_to "http://#{APP_DOMAIN}", :status => 301
    end
  end
end

Make sure you migrate all your database in heroku, by doing heroku rake db:migrate
After you have completed all these steps, you should be good. Check out your domain URL, everything should work pretty :).
If you see any errors in your page, you can view the log by heroku logs
You can access console as heroku console

With features as these, heroku is very convenient to work with.

Please let me know if you need more help.

Deploying Ruby on Rails - Is there a good alternative for Heroku?

Yes there are

This is a very good post I found on the subject

http://blog.sudobits.com/2013/02/15/heroku-alternatives-for-deploying-rails-applications

I went over the options there one by one and, to my humble opinion, OpenShift is the best option for a small-medium website, at least for the beginning of developing and creating a POC\Prototype

Why is it better?

It gives you what Heroku will give you
It give you local (persistant) storage - So you don't need to pay for S3 on Amazon or equivalent - I guess that in some point you would like to do that (to use S3), but at least for the begining you don't need to put money on it
It seems that the website is running faster
I find it more flexible in terms of controlling what is happening on the machine

Are there any disadvantages?

The only disadvantage I could find on Openshift is that it seems that the deployment takes much more time then on Heroku and there is considerable delay on the first time you address the website (But after the first time is working faster - Not related to browser caching if you think this is the issue)

It might be that the Gemfile section under this document https://www.openshift.com/blogs/converting-an-existing-rails-app-to-run-on-openshift can solve this issue...I will try it later

What are the steps I need to do in order to deploy my already existing application on Openshift?

In many places I found explanations about how to create and deploy new application, but it was a little bit hard to understand how to put my already existing application on OpenShift

This is the reason I want to explain that

Assumptions
- Your application is git controlled already
- Its path is /home/dev/MyApp
- you are now under /home/dev

Create Openshift account on https://www.openshift.com
Use the command line tools, I found them much more informative
Go to https://www.openshift.com/get-started
Follow steps 1..3 in order to install and setup the command line tools
cd to your rails application folder /home/dev/MyApp
Create a new application domain - Run : rhc domain-create <domain name>
Create your application in OpenShift by running
rhc app-create -a MyApp -t ruby-1.9 --no-git
-a sets the application name under OpenShift - It can be something totally different from your rails application name
-t sets the application type - I think that for now ruby 1.9 is their highest supported version
--no-git tells not to create git - Because we already got one
Setup your DB
- Install the appropriate DB cartridge for your OpenShift application by calling
  rhc cartridge add <DB cartridge type> -a <Application Name>
  For example :
  rhc cartridge add mysql-5.1 -a MyApp
  It also supports MongoDB and PostgreSQL
  (see here https://www.openshift.com/developers/technologies)
- Change your database.yml to relate to the OpenShift database - Now, that is very easy since OpenShift got a lot of its configuration as environment variables and you can simply use it wherever you need - For example :
```
production:
  adapter: mysql
  encoding: utf8
  database: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME']%>
  pool: 5
  host: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_HOST']%>
  port: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PORT']%>
  username: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_USERNAME']%>
  password: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PASSWORD']%>
  socket: <%=ENV['OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_SOCKET']%>
```
Make sure everything is working locally
- Run : 'bundle install'
- Run : 'rails s' - See that everything is OK
Git - Add the OpenShift repository as one of your remote repositories and push it
- Make sure all your work is updated , commited and syncronized with your GitHub - This can save a lot of headach later
- Run : rhc app-show <application name> - This will show you all the information about your application - Copy the Git URL
- Run : git remote add openshift <OpenShift repo URL>
- Take whatever OpenShift is adding by merging
  Run : git merge openshift/master -s recursive -X ours
- Commit the changes : git commit -am 'adding OpenShift files
- Push to OpenShift : git push openshift

That is all , now your application should be deployed on OpenShift

How do I open my deployed web site?

Using the rhc app-show <application name> command you can see your website url

It will usually be http://<application name>-<domain name>.rhcloud.com

It is quite easy to change it to your own domain

Just run rhc alias add <app name> <your domain>
Then in your DNS management - Edit the CNAME 'www' definition to point to
http://<application name>-<domain name>.rhcloud.com

How do I connect to my OpenShift machine?

Again , using rhc app-show <application name> you can see the SSH address
Simply run ssh <SSH address> in order to connect

How do I run the migrate and seed automatically upon deployment?

One nice thing in OpenShift is the ability to add custom actions (action-hooks) that are being triggered in different stages of the deployment

You can read more about it here https://www.openshift.com/developers/deploying-and-building-applications

For now, I will only talk about the deploy action-hook

Under your application folder go to .openshift/action_hooks and create a file named deploy under it
Make this file executable - Run : chmod +x deploy
Put some code into it
For example:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Starting deploy"

pushd ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR} > /dev/null

echo "Change directory to ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR}public"

cd ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR}

cd public

echo "Creating soft link to ${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR}uploads named uploads"

ln -s ${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR}uploads uploads

echo "Running bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production"

bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production"

echo "Running bundle exec rake db:seed RAILS_ENV=production"

bundle exec rake db:seed RAILS_ENV="production"

popd > /dev/null
- The soft link will be explained later - it is needed for the routing to find the Carrierwave uploaded files
Add the file to your git - git add deploy (from inside the folder of course)
Commit your changes and push to openshift remote

How can I integrate Carrierwave so I could upload files and save on OpenShift?

There are two points

Where will the files be saved ? - This is easy
Will the routing know how to fetch my uploaded files ?

Setting the saving path:

Set the initializers\carrierwave.rb file to be

CarrierWave.configure do |config|
  if Rails.env.production?
    config.storage = :file
    config.enable_processing = true
    config.root = ENV['OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR']
    config.cache_dir = config.root + 'uploads'
  end    
end

leave the uploaders as they are by default, meaning storage :file

and

def store_dir

"uploads/#{model.class.to_s.underscore}/#{mounted_as}/#{model.id}"

end

The use of the $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR folder will make sure we will be able to write the files and that it will stay there

Making sure the routing will find the files:

It took me a while to come up with that trick (not too much, just a couple of hours)

Rails routing knows how to relate only the the folders that are under the application folder - soo, on OpenShift machine, it will look for the uploaded files folder (named uploads in our case) under the ${OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR}\public folder , this is where the soft link I put in the deploy file is becoming handy - It simply cheats the system and making it to go and fetch those file from a folder which is not under the application folder

I know there are a lot of posts about those issues and how to deploy and everything, but I just wanted to put some order into it.

Of course there might be mistakes and inaccuracies in what I wrote since I didn't documented every step of the way but just from what I remember, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in some details.

One of the best sourced is the OpenShift documentation

I hope those things will help people and save you time and money

Enjoy

Why I get an Error when trying deploy Ruby on Rails app to Heroku?

OK, I solved the problem. Maybe it will help someone in the future:

update Ruby version to 2.6.1
gem uninstall bundler and install again gem install bundler -v 2.0.2
delete Gemfile.lock and bundle install
git push heroku master
it works :)

Deploy Rails app to Heroku without using git?

Yes you can deploy to heroku without using git.
You can use a plugin heroku push. You can find it at https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-push.

Deploying Rails App via Heroku uses an old version of Node

Not sure exactly what it is, but the issue had something to do with the Heroku buildpack I was using (heroku-buildpack-bundler2)

Here's what I did to solve it:

$ heroku buildpacks:set heroku/ruby
$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 heroku/nodejs

$ git push heroku master

All works fine now :-)

Deploy Ruby on Rails App to Heroku with mysql database

It looks like you need change your gemfile to conform with Heroku's production standards as they use PostgreSQL:

group :production do
  gem 'pg'
  gem 'rails_12factor', '0.0.2'
end

gem 'mysql2'

After updating your gemfile, run bundle install in your terminal. Git commit your changes and push to Heroku to see if that fixes the issue.

Why do people use Heroku when AWS is present? What distinguishes Heroku from AWS?

AWS / Heroku are both free for small hobby projects (to start with).

If you want to start an app right away, without much customization of the architecture, then choose Heroku.

If you want to focus on the architecture and to be able to use different web servers, then choose AWS. AWS is more time-consuming based on what service/product you choose, but can be worth it. AWS also comes with many plugin services and products.

Heroku

Platform as a Service (PAAS)
Good documentation
Has built-in tools and architecture.
Limited control over architecture while designing the app.
Deployment is taken care of (automatic via GitHub or manual via git commands or CLI).
Not time consuming.

AWS

Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)
Versatile - has many products such as EC2, LAMBDA, EMR, etc.
Can use a Dedicated instance for more control over the architecture, such as choosing the OS, software version, etc. There is more than one backend layer.
Elastic Beanstalk is a feature similar to Heroku's PAAS.
Can use the automated deployment, or roll your own.

Pushing the app to production on Heroku is failing

Your code is deployed just fine. But something about your application is throwing an error when you try to load the homepage.

Heroku is really friendly for checking the logs.

You can check the logs in your dashboard. The URL will be like this:
https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/(yourappname)/logs

Or, install the Heroku Command Line Interface
then from the console, within your project file, do this:
heroku logs -t

This will print out the server logs on your local console.

I'd bet a dollar that you actually forgot to perform a migration:

heroku run rails db:migrate

This is usually the thing I forget to do.

Should I Deploy My Ruby on Rails Application on Heroku