How to deploy Rails App on Heroku?

4 min readSep 11, 2020

Making your projects live is probably the best way to demo your work to the recruiters. Initially, we all start by running our projects on the localhost, which works just fine. Yet, when it comes to demoing the project to the recruiters, it is more convenient to have a live site. It will allow you to access your project site on any computer, at any time and/or place as long as you have an internet connection. You will not have to walk around with a laptop to demonstrate your work.

Now, if you’re wondering how can you make your site live on the internet, without having to pay, you’re solution is Heroku.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a cloud-based platform that enables developers to build, run, and operate applications. Our aim is to host the application on Heroku’s web server, which could be very time consuming if we had to do it from scratch. Although it took me hours to successfully deploy my first Rails app to Heroku, I am sure if I had to implement it from scratch, it would have taken longer.

There are few initial steps that you’ve to complete before start working toward our main aim, hosting your Ruby on Rails application on Heroku.

Cloud Application Platform | Heroku

Whether you're building a simple prototype or a business-critical product, Heroku's fully-managed platform gives you…

www.heroku.com

Install Heroku Command Line Interface (CLI), it enables developers to locally set up the Heroku apps from the terminal.

The Heroku CLI

The Heroku Command Line Interface (CLI) makes it easy to create and manage your Heroku apps directly from the terminal…

devcenter.heroku.com

Install Postgres, it is important to use PostgreSQL to deploy applications on Heroku.

Now, if you’re done with all the installations, let’s move on to the fun part!

Step 1: Setup Heroku Locally

In order to run Heroku locally, login to your Heroku account from the terminal.

heroku login

Step 2: Create a new Rails app

Create the app and move into the root directory.

rails new myapp --database=postgresql

This enables us to use PostgreSQL with the Ruby on Rails application. It is important to use PostgreSQL on Heroku.

Step 3: Database

If you’re trying to deploy an existing application which you created without specifying the PostgreSQL database, then edit your gem file by adding the PostgreSQL gem and removing gem 'sqlite3' from the Rails project.

gem 'pg'

Note: Don’t forget to run bundle install .

Create the model, controller, view, routes, and seeds of your Rails application if you haven’t already.

Step 4: GitHub Repository

Add the project to a GitHub repository and commit the changes

git init
git add .
git commit -m "deploy app to heroku"
git push origin master

Step 5: Create an Application on Heroku

Finally, we can get started with the deployment of the application. Be in the root directory of the application, then run the following:

heroku create projectName

If you run heroku create to build the app, Heroku will auto-generate a domain name for the URL of your application. It is recommended to use a domain that relates to your application.

Step 6: Push the app to Heroku

In order to deploy the application, you have to push all the changes to the master file in Heroku. It is very similar to GitHub.

Similar to GitHub, add the changes to your local repository by running git add . , commit the changes git commit -m "deploy my app to heroku" , and push the app to Heroku master with the following command:

git push heroku master

Note: In order to push the code in theheroku master branch, you’ve to be in your GitHub master branch. If you want to use a different branch to deploy your project in Heroku run the following command:

git push heroku nameOfTheBranch:master

At this point, if you run into any errors, check if you’re in the correct directory, or if you committed all the changes. If you’re still stuck, ask google or StackOverflow for help!

Step 7: Rails Database Migration

Finally, manually seed and migrate the database to Heroku:

heroku run rake db:seed
heroku run rake db:migrate

To view the application, simply run heroku open in your terminal.

Bonus:

If you have any images in your application that seem to break in your Heroku site, modify the config/production.rb file by setting the following line to true.