Staging instance on Heroku

Question

I\'d like to be able to push code to dev.myapp.com for testing and then to www.myapp.com for production use. Is this possible with Heroku?

Answer 1

Things are easier now. Here's how you do it...

Create an app for each environment

$ heroku create myapp --remote production
$ heroku create myapp-staging --remote staging

This will create named remote repos for each app, which you can see in .git/config.

You can now use either the --app or --remote switches to target a particular app:

$ heroku info --app myapp-staging
$ heroku info --remote staging

Set Rails environments

For Rails apps, Heroku defaults to the "production" environment. If you want your staging app to run in a staging environment, create the environment in your project and set the corresponding RAILS_ENV and RAKE_ENV environment variables on the app:

$ heroku config:set RACK_ENV=staging RAILS_ENV=staging --remote staging

Configure environments

If you have other configuration variables you'll need to pass them in for each environment as well.

$ heroku config:set AWS_KEY=abc --remote staging
$ heroku config:set AWD_SECRET=123 --remote staging
...etc

That's a huge pain though so I just use my snappconfig gem and run

$ rake heroku:config:load[myapp-staging]

to load my project's YAML config files into Heroku.

Deploy

Now you just push to Heroku like this:

$ git push staging master
$ git push production master

and migrate like this:

$ heroku run rake db:migrate --remote staging
$ heroku run rake db:migrate --remote production

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(See Managing Multiple Environments for an App | Heroku Dev Center for more info and shortcuts.)