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

Your interface to Heroku is essentially a Git branch. The Heroku gem does some work through their API, but within your Git repository, it's just a new remote branch.

heroku create yourapp # production
git br -D heroku # delete the default branch

heroku create staging-yourapp # staging
git br -D heroku # delete the default branch

Once you set up multiple applications on Heroku, you should be able to configure your Git repository like this:

git remote add staging git@heroku.com:staging-yourapp.git
git push origin staging

git remote add production git@heroku.com:yourapp.git
git push origin production

I usually work in a 'working' branch, and use Github for my master.

Assuming that's the case for you, your deploy workflow would probably look something like:

git co -b working
# do some work

# push to github:
git co master
git merge working
git push

# push to staging:
git co staging
git merge master
git push origin staging

# push to production
git co production
git merge master
git push origin production

Answer 2

This explains everything you need to know if your a newbie like me: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/multiple-environments

Answer 3

A key part of the original question is about linking up the staging app to a subdomain (dev.myapp.com) of the main app (www.myapp.com). This hasn't been addressed in any of the answers.

Step 1: Configure both production ('myapp') and staging ('staging-myapp') versions of your app as is indicated in the answer by Luke Bayes

Step 2: In your domain management system (e.g. GoDaddy):

Create a CNAME record:  dev.myapp.com 
that points to:   proxy.heroku.com

Step 3: Configure Heroku to route dev.myapp.com to staging-myapp:

heroku domains:add dev.myapp.com --app staging-myapp

After the CNAME record has had time to propagate, you will be able to run your staging app at dev.myapp.com.

Answer 4

You should check the heroku_san

It does a pretty good job juggling with environments on heroku.

Answer 5

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.)