I have more than one app/git remote at heroku and I would like to know if it is possible to configure a default application so that, whenever I forget to specify the app (--app
), the toolbelt would use it.

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3 Answers
You can set the heroku.remote
key in your repo's Git config to the name of the default remote. For example, if your remote is called staging
, you could do this:
$ git config heroku.remote staging
To see how this works, here is the relevant source.
For more, information about this, see Managing Multiple Environments for an App.

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2Answer with source, nice! If I could double vote, I would do it. – Rafael Oliveira Jul 09 '13 at 17:10
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13Am I misunderstanding what this should do? I was expecting this to allow me to use heroku toolbelt CLI without having to specify `--app`. It's not working for me: – denishaskin Jun 20 '14 at 17:13
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1@denishaskin Would you mind to paste `git remote -v` results? – Rafael Oliveira Jun 20 '14 at 18:13
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this is an awesome solution – wlingke Aug 24 '15 at 17:20
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1The current Heroku CLI seems to set git remote name `heroku` as default (ref. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git#for-a-new-heroku-app). So many users should set `heroku` instead of `staging` (i.e. `$ git config heroku.remote heroku`). The remote name can be checked by `$ git remote -v`. If the output is like this: `git-remote-name https://git.heroku.com/your-heroku-app-name.git`, you should type `$ git config heroku.remote git-remote-name`. – shuuji3 May 26 '18 at 15:19
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@denishaskin I was having the same issue, and fixed it by running `git config heroku.remote heroku` and then `heroku git:remote -a
` – Nicholas Barry Mar 04 '19 at 15:59
You could also go for:
heroku git:remote -a <name-of-the-app>
or if you tend to make a lot of mistakes in the configuration of wrong apps, you can use this library I made: https://github.com/kubek2k/heroshell
This is a Heroku wrapper shell that allows you to work in the context of a given Heroku application

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3This is the answer that actually sets the default Heroku app, so you don't have to keep specifying '-a' – Tom Warner Apr 21 '21 at 15:14
You can set the HEROKU_APP
environment variable.
Found this question while searching for it myself. The other answers refer to Heroku's old ruby-based CLI. The new JS CLI doesn't seem to support the same git-remote-reading feature. A quick search of the source code on GitHub found this.

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This worked for me to set the default app for Heroku CLI in order to avoid specifying the -a or --app parameter in all commands. – Vichoko May 20 '22 at 15:01